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 OpsWorks
Score 4.6 out of 10
N/A
AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service that provides managed instances of Chef and Puppet.
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.
Where you already have some Chef recipes to build your application boxes and are happy to run directly on VMs, OpsWorks really shines. It won't do anything too complex for you, so it only really works well for simple stacks (load balancers, application layers, database layers). If you want to do more complex infrastructure, Cloudformation or Terraform are probably worth looking at.
Getting up and running with OpsWorks is a very technical and potentially time-consuming process. You need to know the ins and outs of Chef/Puppet if you really want to get into it and there isn't a convenient way to test out the environment locally so debugging can be time-consuming.
To take advantage of some of the newer AWS instance types you need to be running on a VPC, which again is a pain if you don't have a DevOps team.
The error logs and monitoring metrics in OpsWorks are pretty basic and haven't changed much over the years.
Unless you pay for a pricey support package getting support on OpsWorks will be pretty slow. Documentation is also relatively limited and sometimes hard to follow when compared to competitors. Generally, we've been able to get the answers we need from OpsWorks support when we run into problems but don't expect rapid responses.
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.
OpsWorks isn't really a direct competitor to Terraform/Cloudformation, but it does allow you to do some of the more simple things on offer quite quickly and effectively. Opsworks was used for this reason, along with existing internal knowledge of Chef. Along with some of the other services on offer from AWS, it is good to use as a stepping stone along the way when building your systems - or perhaps it would be entirely suitable for a fairly simple project.
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.
