Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) vs. IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft's Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is designed to make deploying and managing containerized applications easy. It offers serverless Kubernetes, an integrated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) experience, and enterprise-grade security and governance. It allows development and operations teams on a single platform to rapidly build, deliver, and scale applications with confidence.N/A
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Score 7.9 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is a managed Kubernetes offering, delivering user tools and built-in security for rapid delivery of applications that users can bind to cloud services related to IBM Watson®, IoT, DevOps and data analytics. As a certified K8s provider, IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service provides intelligent scheduling, self-healing, horizontal scaling, service discovery and load balancing, automated rollouts and rollbacks, and secret and configuration management. The Kubernetes…N/A
Pricing
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Considered Both Products
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Chose Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
This depends fully on your needs respectively what you expect or the amount of work you can deal with.
Both services are not the silver bullet that will take care of all your pain points. It is needed to analyze/evaluate them carefully and then decide which makes the most …
Chose Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
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 …
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
This is a very difficult question, because there are a lot of similarities and the differences are minor but could be important if your use-case requires something like that.
For example if you need a cluster that is ready sooner than 45 minutes or a data center/location in …
Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Many solutions and vendors are offering the service to deploy a solution for based Kubernetes cloud, but we have selected IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service for the optimization, high availability, DRP process, reduced downtimes, support, documentation, and the easy way to deploy Kube…
Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
IBM Kubernetes Service and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) are two popular managed Kubernetes offerings that allow organizations to deploy, manage and scale their containerized applications.

Advantages of IBM Kubernetes Service
Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Well, as we were in a state to compulsory implement this service, but then it is very suited for deployment of a service that has higher fault tolerance. And maintaining the lifecycle of custom made resources. And the ability to integrate other services also
Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
I say IKS still has a more to work, while it benefits in being an early adopter like GKE, most of these services are easier to work on when it comes to web management, something the IKS lacks and needs to improve since its release because of how well-established the management …
Features
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Container Management
Comparison of Container Management features of Product A and Product B
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
7.6
5 Ratings
7% below category average
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
8.0
20 Ratings
1% below category average
Security and Isolation8.65 Ratings7.920 Ratings
Container Orchestration8.05 Ratings8.420 Ratings
Cluster Management7.45 Ratings7.720 Ratings
Storage Management7.35 Ratings7.820 Ratings
Resource Allocation and Optimization8.05 Ratings8.020 Ratings
Discovery Tools6.95 Ratings7.719 Ratings
Update Rollouts and Rollbacks6.45 Ratings7.820 Ratings
Self-Healing and Recovery8.05 Ratings8.318 Ratings
Analytics, Monitoring, and Logging7.65 Ratings8.120 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Small Businesses
Portainer
Portainer
Score 9.1 out of 10
Portainer
Portainer
Score 9.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(6 ratings)
7.8
(85 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.9
(16 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(1 ratings)
8.7
(16 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(1 ratings)
7.7
(4 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.7
(15 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.6
(3 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
1.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
AKS works very well for running containerized applications that require high availability and scalability. This includes systems like our HRIS platform and customer-facing web applications. AKS is a good choice when applications are broken into multiple services that need independent scaling and deployment. It provides the flexibility needed to manage these architectures effectively. But for single, low-traffic applications or simple internal tools, AKS can be overkill. For scenarios like that Azure App Service would be better.
Read full review
IBM
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service also stands out in environments where the workloads vary continuously and require befitting scale. The product excels particularly in microservices structures, wherein the companies would harness the capacity for container orchestration and automated scaling. Still, it may face the challenges due to monolith applications that have not been originally developed for using container technology.
Read full review
Pros
Microsoft
  • AKS makes it easier to replicate data to multiple regions
  • Azure portal make it easier to manage the resources of the organization
Read full review
IBM
  • IBM has a strong focus on serverless and Kubernetes. This shows in the platform. Deploying containers to Kubernetes was very easy.
  • Deploying a Kubernetes cluster through the GUI is very easy and quick. On top of that, IBM Cloud offers a single node cluster for Free.
  • Container Registry is a very good product for managing container images. Integration with Kubernetes was seemless.
  • Portability. To transition from Google Cloud Kubernetes to IBM Cloud Kubernetes took almost no effort. We mostly use the CLI and the standard tools such as kubectl were present.
Read full review
Cons
Microsoft
  • Steep learning curve
  • Expected charges are unclear until you see real production usage
  • Operations teams need to learn an entirely new skill set
Read full review
IBM
  • I constantly get this error even when everything is well configured prefect.exceptions.AuthorizationError: [{'path': ['auth_info'], 'message': 'AuthenticationError: Forbidden', 'extensions': {'code': 'UNAUTHENTICATED'}}]
  • Then sometimes the error disapear without changine anything, happened twice to me. Should there be an issue with the authentication service? Please let's improve or let users know why this may be happening.
  • Improve the UX in the browse console when removing many images at once
  • UX on the process of installing KeyCloack operator
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
IBM
We have our application running on a CentOS compartment on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. We have been utilizing the help since IBM Cloud initially dispatched. We liked the adaptability and versatility that IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service give us. Since we are tiny, the Kubernetes administration is just utilized at present inside my venture bunch.
Read full review
Usability
Microsoft
As already said, the UI/CLI and even terraform are perfectly fine, but certain details could be documented better. For instance, if I want to secure the whole Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with my own managed keys, then it is very complex and hard to get there. Not really a single source that gives you the whole picture. Besides that, it is still good to use, in most cases intuitive but details mentioned as above can be tricky.
Read full review
IBM
We actually haven't had any real problems in our clusters recently and the results we have gotten from adopting IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service have been beyond even our greatest expectations. The community has helped optimize the use of the system and make it relatively simpler to use.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
IBM
IBM's cloud is almost infallible.
Read full review
Performance
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
IBM
IBM's cloud has a site in my conuntry (MEXICO) so the network latency was almost 0
Read full review
Support Rating
Microsoft
Microsoft support was really good, whenever we raise any ticket they come back to us within a couple of hours.
Read full review
IBM
The self-guided support was solid, and there are plenty of online videos to guide first time users, but I think one area of improvement is a faster way to transfer a large quantity of files from our local machine to the cloud for storage (Aspera)
Read full review
Online Training
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
IBM
Online training is really an important resource for using these tools. IBM's help center is rich in useful information and tips. Also, external guides and tutorials are available (e.g. on youtube), but I followed only IBM ones and I had no difficulties.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
IBM
Ease of use. Very intuitive. We have been looking for a product that allows us to orchestrate our docker containers in a way where it allows us to effectively scale our applications to production. It also provides us a way of monitoring all our infrastructure in a very clear concise way.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
Amazon EKS stacked up very well and had better performance in some areas. However, Azure Kubernetes Service was a better fit given our Azure environment.
Read full review
IBM
We mainly selected [IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service] because IBM fabric blockchain service is mostly compatible with it. To have all the infrastructure in a single cloud to get the best output we selected the [IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service].
Read full review
Scalability
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
IBM
IBM's CKS does not offers automatic autoscaling nor vertical scaling (automatic). Other services like Google Kubernetes Engine scales up and down very well
Read full review
Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • We had to spend more time on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) than on AWS and GCP to get our kubernetes cluster up and running
  • The resources on nodes need to be left out unused, so effectively it is wasting money there
  • It definitely made us spend more time into maintaining kubernetes
Read full review
IBM
  • Increased development speed and agility allows to build features faster and more economically.
  • Improved resource utilization helps keep applications running very efficiently, which saves on cloud service expenses.
  • Scalability and resilience allows for scaling up or down based on demand, which keeps applications running efficiently and more economically.
Read full review
ScreenShots