Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
- What it is
- Managed Kubernetes. AWS runs and patches the Kubernetes control plane; you run the workloads.
- Uses upstream, certified-conformant Kubernetes — standard manifests and tooling work unchanged.
- Why choose it over ECS
- Portability: the same manifests run on premises or in another cloud.
- Existing Kubernetes skills, tooling, and Helm charts carry over.
- Access to the Kubernetes ecosystem (operators, service meshes, custom schedulers).
- Cost nuance
- Charged an hourly fee per cluster plus the compute (EC2 nodes or AWS Fargate).
- Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) has no control-plane charge.
- Not to be confused with
- ECS — same job, AWS-proprietary, simpler, cheaper, less portable.