Introduction to Kubernetes

The State of Managed Kubernetes

Since Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) became generally available (GA) in June, all three major cloud providers now support a managed Kubernetes service in production. All three—Amazon ​EKS, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)—​now also support Kubernetes version 1.10.x, reducing the gap GKE held since Google released what was then called Google Container Engine in 2015.

While the major differences in managed Kubernetes services extend to cloud-level differences from the providers (e.g. Azure is obviously more compatible with Windows-based products), there are several key billing and functionality differences in the three offerings. We will start with Amazon EKS, since Amazon Web Services (AWS) dominates most cloud computing marketing. We will then work our way backward in terms of date released, namely AKS followed by GKE.