Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) vs. AWS Lambda

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon EKS
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a managed container service to run and scale Kubernetes applications in the cloud or on-premises, available on AWS or on-premise through Amazon EKS Anywhere.
$0.10
per month
AWS Lambda
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
AWS Lambda is a serverless computing platform that lets users run code without provisioning or managing servers. With Lambda, users can run code for virtually any type of app or backend service—all with zero administration. It takes of requirements to run and scale code with high availability.
$NaN
Per 1 ms
Pricing
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)AWS Lambda
Editions & Modules
Amazon EKS Cluster
$.10
per hour of each cluster created
128 MB
$0.0000000021
Per 1 ms
1024 MB
$0.0000000167
Per 1 ms
10240 MB
$0.0000001667
Per 1 ms
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon EKSAWS Lambda
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)AWS Lambda
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)AWS Lambda
Small Businesses
Portainer
Portainer
Score 9.3 out of 10
IBM Cloud Functions
IBM Cloud Functions
Score 8.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Score 9.2 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Docker
Docker
Score 9.2 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)AWS Lambda
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(1 ratings)
8.8
(45 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(13 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.7
(20 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)AWS Lambda
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
It is well suited when you want to have a Kubernetes cluster in AWS Cloud and want to avoid all the management overhead of maintaining your own cluster in terms of the control plane. EKS seems to be lacking in features when compared with AKS and GKE. Backups, service mesh, and monitoring have a lot of room for improvements.
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Amazon AWS
[AWS Lambda] is very well suited for the projects that doesn't have any infra but needs it where short running processes are required. But if your application need to run continuously than this might not be the very apt tool for you.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • Managed control plane
  • Autoscaling
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Amazon AWS
  • Lambda provides multiple methods for triggering functions, this includes AWS resources and services and external triggers like APIs and CLI calls.
  • The compute provided my Lambda is largely hands off for operations teams. Once the function is deployed, the management overhead is minimal since there are no servers to maintain.
  • Lambda's pricing can be very cost effective given that users are only charged for the time the function runs and associated costs like network or storage if those are used. A function that executes quickly and is not called often can cost next to nothing.
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Cons
Amazon AWS
  • AWSIAM integration with Kubernetes RBAC could be better.
  • Enabling some add-ons like service mesh, and monitoring will be nice instead of having to install them yourself after the creation of the cluster.
  • EKS bootstrap time could be faster ...
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Amazon AWS
  • Putting a significant portion of your codebase into AWS Lambda and taking advantage of the high level of integration with other AWS services comes with the risk of vendor lock-in.
  • While the AWS Lambda environment is "not your problem," it's also not at your disposal to extend or modify, nor does it preserve state between function executions.
  • AWS Lambda functions are subject to strict time limitations, and will be aborted if they exceed five minutes of execution time. This can be a problem for some longer-running tasks that are otherwise well-suited to serverless delivery.
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Usability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Amazon AWS
I give it a seven is usability because it's AWS. Their UI's are always clunkier than the competition and their documentation is rather cumbersome. There's SO MUCH to dig through and it's a gamble if you actually end up finding the corresponding info if it will actually help. Like I said before, going to google with a specific problem is likely a better route because AWS is quite ubiquitous and chances are you're not the first to encounter the problem. That being said, using SAM (Serverless application model) and it's SAM Local environment makes running local instances of your Lambdas in dev environments painless and quite fun. Using Nodejs + Lambda + SAM Local + VS Code debugger = AWESOME.
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Support Rating
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Amazon AWS
I have not needed support for AWS Lambda, since it is already using Python, which has resources all over the internet. AWS blog posts have information about how to install some libraries, which is necessary for some more complex operations, but this is available online and didn't require specific customer support for.
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
It feels like AWS is behind the EKS race, the only advantage I'm able to see right now is the support of IPv6, however, trying to promote AWS alternatives that are different from the market and more like a vendor locking solutions like ECS/Fargate have kept AWS behind and focusing on the wrong things. EKS needs to really improve its integration with the Kubernetes ecosystem and have an enterprise solution for monitoring, backups, and service mesh.
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Amazon AWS
Azure Functions is another product that provides lambda functionality, but the documentation for some of Azure's products is quite hard to read. Additionally, AWS Lambda was one of the first cloud computing products on a large cloud service that implemented lambda functions, so they have had the most time to develop the product, increase the quality of service, and extend functionality to more languages. Amazon, by far, has the best service for Lambda that I know.
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Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • Migrating all our workloads from ec2 VMs to containers running in Kubernetes has been a huge improvement for the management and resilience of our Infrastructure.
  • EKS Upgrade process to a new version seems to be taking very long ....
  • EKS creation time usually takes over 10 minutes in us-east-1, we would like faster creation times to be under 5 minutes.
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Amazon AWS
  • I was able to perform a lot of processing on data delivered from my website and little or no cost. This was a big plus to me.
  • Programming AWS Lambda is quite easy once you understand the time limits to the functions.
  • AWS Lambda has really good integration with the AWS S3 storage system. This a very good method of delivering data to be processed and a good place to pick it up after processing.
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ScreenShots