Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) vs. Red Hat OpenShift

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

If you are going to start using Kubernetes or thinking of moving to Kubernetes from a pre-existing solution, you might as well go with OpenShift. You will end up spending less time and money getting your OpenShift solution set up and running compared to doing so with plain Kubernetes. It has been a game-changer for my company, and we will continue to work on OpenShift for the foreseeable future.

Incentivized

• Managed control plane
• Autoscaling

Incentivized

• Obviously, it does container orchestration very well because it's the main purpose of the product. Creating routes has been very easy with the product, creating accessible routes, managing quotas, managing our workspace and our workload has been very efficient with this as well as managing our horizontal scalability.

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

• Upgrades can be stressful to watch - often cluster operators report that they are failing even though the upgrade is proceeding without issue.
• Native observability is lacking. The canned dashboards are great, but to really dive into an issue, you need to be proficient in PromQL or have a third-party product installed for correlation.
• It would be nice to be able to review logs for containers that have been removed, at least for a few hours after they're gone. Instead we have to rely on log aggregators to view historic details.

Incentivized

Leverage OpenShift Online constantly at both the free and paid tiers. While AWS is convenient, it often brings more administration than I want to deal with for a quick application (i.e. Drupal or Wordpress blog). OpenShift also simplifies the DNS registration and ability to share application environments with team members

Incentivized

As I said before, the obserability is one of the weakest point of OpenShift and that has a lot to do with usability. The Kibana console is not fully integrated with OpenShift console and you have to switch from tab to tab to use it. Same with Prometheus, Jaeger and Grafan, it's a "simple" integration but if you want to do complex queries or dashboards you have to go to the specific console

Incentivized

Now, we can provide high-performance applications because we have the freedom to manage all sides of the applications (code, infra, network) on the same platform. With the Openshift platform, we're able to scale our applications as needed, and Operators that provide a large number of products in a simple way help us manage our applications.

Incentivized

Their customer support team is good and quick to respond. On a couple of occassions, they have helped us in solving some issues which we were finding a tad difficult to comprehend. On a rare occasion, the response was a bit slow but maybe it was because of the festival season. Overall a good experience on this front.

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

From what I remember of Pivotal Cloud Foundry/Tanzu, OpenShift has a lot more features. Ultimately, our team went with OpenShift. After trialing multiple providers, we decided OpenShift was the best experience. We also had more confidence in Red Hat.

Incentivized

It's easy to understand what are being billed and what's included in each type of subscription. Same with the support (Std or Premium) you know exactly what to expect when you need to use it. The "core" unit approach on the subscription made really simple to scale and carry the workloads from one site to another.

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

• We never faced any major outage with the OpenShift platform. It's been running fine except for our network timeouts. That's it for this. It's not about, the pods themselves are running fine, but identifying this kind of issue hasn't been easy, but it didn't have any real business impact. It is just about other sre just to better serve our client and improve the platform's reliability.

Incentivized