Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) vs. DigitalOcean Kubernetes

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.

Incentivized

DO Kubernetes is well-suited for: - deploying APIs - deploying workers - log collection and analysis (ie ELK stack) - deploying Helm charts and anything that can be mapped on to K8s concepts Less appropriate for anything requiring no public Internet access (ie VPC only). Less appropriate for anything requiring integration with the DO app platform via VPC, at the moment.

Incentivized

• Managed control plane
• Autoscaling

Incentivized

• Hosted dashboard
• Hosted container registry
• Horizontal auto-scaling
• LetsEncrypt SSL termination

Incentivized

• 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 ...

Incentivized

• Option for internal VPC-only deployment
• Better integration with cloud firewall
• Better integration with DO App platform via VPC

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

DigitalOcean is the most affordable and straightforward of the hosted Kubernetes options we evaluated. All features that we require are supported without an excess of complication of extraneous features. Straightforward billing is also very important for us in comparison to the Big Three cloud hosts, which have very complicated billing practices. DigitalOcean also provides a platform with very little vendor lock-in.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Excellent uptime
• Low cost for provided value
• Good integration with the rest of the DO platform to provide additional value

Incentivized