Google Kubernetes Engine vs Illumio comparison

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1,701 views|1,329 comparisons
93% willing to recommend
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4,418 views|3,349 comparisons
85% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Google Kubernetes Engine and Illumio based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Container Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Google Kubernetes Engine vs. Illumio Report (Updated: May 2020).
768,857 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) takes care of managing Kubernetes, including the main control plane. It also offers solutions for monitoring resources and handling external traffic, which is essential for us. Being a cloud-native solution, it relieves us from worrying about these operational aspects.""The main advantage of GKE is that it is a managed service. This means that Google is responsible for managing the master node in the Kubernetes cluster system. As a result, we can focus on deploying applications to the slaves, while Google handles any updates and security patches. The fact that GKE is fully integrated into the Google ecosystem, including solutions such as BigQuery and VertexAI. This makes it easier for us to integrate these tools into our process. This integration ultimately speeds up our time to market and reduces the time and effort spent on managing infrastructure. The managed aspect of GKE allows us to simply deploy and utilize it without having to worry about the technicalities of infrastructure management.""Before using this solution, it was a lot of manual tasks and a lot of people participated in the process.""The product has no downtime.""The features are typical Kubernetes, but Google One offers a better GUI-based deployment. It's more sophisticated and integrates well with other services, providing a better customer experience.""It's easy to manage and deploy. It's the best.""Stability-wise, this solution is really good.""The product’s dashboard is very intuitive."

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"The most valuable feature of Illumio Adaptive Security Platform is monitoring. When I have no requirement from the other application, I can use the web block traffic to build.""It has helped us to understand internal network visibility and firewall policy implementation. We use the product to simplify firewall policy implementation.""The solution is easy to use.""The product provides visibility into how the applications communicate and how the network protocols are being used.""The flexibility of the solution is its most valuable feature.""The solution helps to maintain logs and monitor activities. It also helps us with access management. The tool helps us to secure organizational data that include files.""The features that I have found most useful is the ability to centralize all the rules and then distribute them across various locations. However, I've encountered challenges related to tagging policies, which can be complex to devise. It's a matter that requires careful consideration and stakeholder involvement before implementing such policies.""The Explorer allows you to know the traffic between source and destination."

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Cons
"The user interface is a bit confusing sometimes. You need to navigate between the various consoles we have. It's hard to figure out where things are. It's frustrating. The documentation could be a bit better.""The pricing could be more competitive. It should be cheaper.""The product's stability is an area of concern where improvements are required.""An area in which Google Kubernetes Engine could improve is configuration.""The product could be cheaper.""The monitoring part requires some serious improvements in Google Kubernetes Engine, as it does not have very good monitoring consoles.""The solution does not have a visual interface.""While the GKE cluster is secure, application-level security is an essential aspect that needs to be addressed. The security provided by GKE includes the security of communication between nodes within the cluster and the basic features of Kubernetes security. However, these features may not be sufficient for the security needs of an enterprise. Additional security measures must be added to ensure adequate protection. It has become a common practice to deploy security tools within a Kubernetes cluster. It would be ideal if these tools were included as part of the package, as this is a standard requirement in the industry. Thus, application-level security should be integrated into GKE for improved security measures."

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"The customer service is lagging a bit. It could be better.""Some of the features that can be improved is offer additional guidance on creating an effective and risk-free tagging policy would be highly beneficial.""I would like to see better data security in the product.""Illumio Adaptive Security Platform could improve by supporting more operating systems. For example, Cisco and Apache appliances.""It requires a low-level re-architecting of the product.""The product’s agents don't work very well in OT environments.""The interaction we've had with the support team hasn't been ideal. Technical support should be improved.""The solution is very basic and doesn't do anything other than the orchestration of layer four endpoint firewall rules."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "We are planning to use external support, and hire a commercial partner for it."
  • "This is an open source solution, so there is no pricing or licensing."
  • "Currently, it costs around $1000 per month which sorted our deployment. So once we get more clients, having a huge suffix, costs can go up."
  • "I would rate Kubernetes' pricing four out of five."
  • "The price for Google Kubernetes Engine could be lower - I'd rate its pricing at three out of five."
  • "It is competitive, and it is not expensive. It is almost competitive with AWS and the rest of the cloud solutions. We are spending around 3K USD per month. There are four projects that are currently running, and each one is incurring a cost of around 3K USD."
  • "The pricing for GKE is dependent on the type of machine or virtual machine (VM) that is selected for the nodes in the cluster. There is a degree of flexibility in choosing the specifications of the machine, such as the number of CPUs, GPUs, and so on. Google provides a variety of options, allowing the user to create the desired cluster composition. However, the cost can be quite steep when it comes to regional clusters, which are necessary for high availability and failover. This redundancy is crucial for businesses and is required to handle an increase in requests in case of any issues in one region, such as jumping to a different region in case of a failure in the Toronto region. While it may be tempting to choose the cheapest type of machines, this may result in a limited capacity and user numbers, requiring over-provisioning to handle additional requests, such as those for a web application."
  • "Its pricing is good. They bill us only per user. That's nice."
  • More Google Kubernetes Engine Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "There is a subscription needed to use Illumio Adaptive Security Platform and we pay every three years. Overall the solution is expensive."
  • "The product's pricing is around 10,000-15,000 USD. The pricing is on a yearly basis."
  • More Illumio Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Pricing is always a concern. We keep running the service, and we need to pay for it. I rate the pricing a seven or eight out of ten.
    Top Answer:The notifications are not informative. It's a little confusing at times.
    Top Answer:The features that I have found most useful is the ability to centralize all the rules and then distribute them across various locations. However, I've encountered challenges related to tagging… more »
    Top Answer:The product's pricing is around 10,000-15,000 USD. The pricing is on a yearly basis.
    Top Answer:Some of the features that can be improved is offer additional guidance on creating an effective and risk-free tagging policy would be highly beneficial.
    Ranking
    9th
    Views
    1,701
    Comparisons
    1,329
    Reviews
    24
    Average Words per Review
    472
    Rating
    8.0
    Views
    4,418
    Comparisons
    3,349
    Reviews
    6
    Average Words per Review
    384
    Rating
    8.0
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    GKE
    Illumio Adaptive Security Platform, Illumio ASP
    Learn More
    Overview

    Kubernetes Engine is a managed, production-ready environment for deploying containerized applications. It brings our latest innovations in developer productivity, resource efficiency, automated operations, and open source flexibility to accelerate your time to market.

    Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation is a cloud and data center security solution that helps stop breaches from spreading across hybrid and multi cloud IT environments. The solution is designed to stop ransomware, contain cyber attacks, and reduce risk. With Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation, users can understand relationships and communications to map exposure risk of systems and data, identify the right security posture and secure applications through least-privilege policies, and ensure a Zero Trust security posture.

    Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation Features

    Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Scalability: Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation scales up to 200,000 managed workloads or over 700,000 unmanaged workloads. These workloads can be in the cloud, on-premises, and in hybrid environments.
    • Single pane of visibility: The solution’s single pane of visibility improves your security posture and ability to prevent and respond rapidly to cyberattacks.
    • Simplicity: With Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation, setting up groups and tags is simple. The solution is easy to integrate with next-generation firewalls and can also integrate with IT service management tools to import workload tags to provide more context to workloads.
    • Ransomware containment: The solution provides enforcement boundaries to contain attackers from moving laterally across your organization, enabling security architects to immediately isolate any workload or endpoint compromised in an attack. Enforcement boundaries can be activated instantly through scripts or by manual control, isolating workloads and endpoints already infected from spreading across the organization.

    Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Visibility everywhere: The Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation solution helps ensure that every interaction on your network is accounted for. 
    • Least-privilege access: By implementing Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation, your organization can prevent unexpected breaches from propagating.
    • Adaptability and consistency: The solution guarantees consistent network behavior everywhere. 
    • Proactive posture: Using the solution enables your organization to always be on the lookout for an attack. 
    • Improve breach containment: With the solution, you can prevent unauthorized lateral movement and reduce your blast radius. Creating micro-perimeters around specific assets breaks up your attack surface and gives you the granular control needed to contain breaches.
    • Streamline policy management: The solution enables organizations to decouple segmentation from the underlying network to define policies based on the language that IT uses. Illumio's human-readable labels make policy creation much simpler and faster than traditional network segmentation approaches like VLANs, IP addresses, and port numbers.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation is a solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. Some of its major advantages are that it has a good auto policy writing feature, great mapping, and useful monitoring. 

    Shashi, Technical Consultant at a financial services firm, explains which features she really likes. “The auto policy writing is great. The feature will give you the option of inbound-outbound traffic. The Explorer allows you to know the traffic between source and destination. The illumination definitely stands out. Mapping is great. The application group mapping is useful.”

    The solution has “helpful support, useful monitoring, and high availability,” according to Edwin L., Security Architect at MGM.

    Sample Customers
    Philips Lighting, Alpha Vertex, GroupBy, BQ
    Plantronics, NTT Innovation Institute Inc.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm25%
    Energy/Utilities Company13%
    Comms Service Provider13%
    Manufacturing Company13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm19%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Government6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business46%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise40%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise72%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise63%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise69%
    Buyer's Guide
    Google Kubernetes Engine vs. Illumio
    May 2020
    Find out what your peers are saying about Google Kubernetes Engine vs. Illumio and other solutions. Updated: May 2020.
    768,857 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Google Kubernetes Engine is ranked 9th in Container Management with 32 reviews while Illumio is ranked 4th in Cloud and Data Center Security with 8 reviews. Google Kubernetes Engine is rated 8.0, while Illumio is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Google Kubernetes Engine writes "The auto-scaling feature helps during peak hours, but the support is not great". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Illumio writes "Pprevents attackers or threats from spreading or moving laterally". Google Kubernetes Engine is most compared with Linode, Kubernetes, VMware Tanzu Mission Control and Rancher Labs, whereas Illumio is most compared with Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, VMware NSX, Cisco Secure Workload, Zscaler Internet Access and Microsoft Defender for Cloud. See our Google Kubernetes Engine vs. Illumio report.

    We monitor all Container Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.