Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) vs. Google Kubernetes Engine

At one instance, there was a fire in our data center and the backup power had some issues because of which the whole DC went down. I believe with AKS and the replication it's easier to handle such a situation. Also, the scenario would have been pretty transparent to the end-users.

Incentivized

The Google Kubernetes Engine clusters are very good at being a managed cloud K8s platform - lots of documentation, features, and updates are available. It's also newbie-friendly - for both administrators and developers. Unfortunately, currently, it cannot reach true zero scale - thus, costs (rent for the service) are still involved even if you are barely using it. Thankfully, it's possible to have alternatives in Google Cloud:

• Your own K8s cluster on Compute Engine VMs - you manage it completely; it will have access to a lot of Google Cloud services.
• Cloud Run cluster - less documented but more flexible
• Anthos clusters - you can use this service for a lot of types of K8s clusters - Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, on-prem, AWS, Azure

Incentivized

• Highly repeatable process
• Minimizes the amount of software to install
• Easily scale resources to meet demand

Incentivized

• Deployment of a new GKE cluster is really fast in comparison to other cloud providers.
• GCP is ahead other vendors and always provide the most up to date Kubernetes version.
• GKE automation for master upgrade and the worker nodes pool works really well.

Incentivized

• Need to update cluster manually
• Policies cannot be updated for existing components
• if any change in policy every has to create cluster

Incentivized

• Not as intuitive as it could be
• Documentation could be better, especially for people using other Google Cloud tools
• Not the preferred Kubernetes Engine for many apps

Incentivized

• Google Kubernetes Engine has a good UI and documentation that facilitates setup and helps get projects moving along quickly
• Its built-in logging integrations with StackDriver make it easier to monitor the application and log issues quickly
• Automated orchestration, deployment, and scaling of nodes and networking are all easily configurable with yaml files

Incentivized

Microsoft support was really good, whenever we raise any ticket they come back to us within a couple of hours.

Incentivized

Very good Kubernetes distribution with a reasonable total price. Integration with storage and load balancer for ingress and services speed up every process deployment.

Incentivized

The ability to create new instances (i.e. elastic provisioning) is probably the fastest with Azure Kubernetes Service compared to the alternatives that I have looked at. From a pricing perspective, Microsoft always seems to find a way to be more competitive in this area, and literally every other field they play in.

Incentivized

GKE spins up new nodes a LOT faster than AKS. GKE's auto scaler runs a lot smoother than AKS. GKE has a lot more Kubernetes features baked in natively.

Incentivized

• When issues came up, we reached out to some folks at GCP and they seemed to be very prompt and attentive to our needs. They were always willing to help and provide additional details or recommendations or links to resources. This kind of support is very helpful as it allows us to navigate GKE with more confidence.

Incentivized

• Positive impact in moving applications to cloud from the in-hose data center to save cost
• Sometimes got affected with some bugs on the AKS infrastructure but hasn't caused a big kios as our production footprint in AKS is not yet high

Incentivized

• Positive: Allowed us to start and produce working software regardless of our experience level.
• Positive: Integration with other Google Cloud services that we wanted to use anyway.
• Negative: It's kinda clunky, and some scenarios seem Google Kubernetes Engine-specific instead of being more integrated with other Google Cloud services or the web UI.

Incentivized