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The definitive comparison of the 'Big Three' managed Kubernetes services. Who wins on DX, pricing, and scaling?
| Feature Matrix | EKS Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service. Enterprise scale. | GKE Google Kubernetes Engine. The original and most automated. | AKS Azure Kubernetes Service. Best pricing value for SMBs. |
|---|---|---|---|
Provisioning Speed GKE is generally the fastest to spin up new clusters and nodes. | Medium (5-10m) | Fast (2-4m) | Medium (5-8m) |
Upgrade UX GKE's 'Release Channels' provide the most hands-off upgrade experience. | Manual / Tool-heavy | Seamless / Automated | Semi-automated |
Networking EKS can consume a lot of subnet IPs unless using prefix delegation. | AWS VPC CNI (IP hungry) | VPC-native (Alias IP) | Azure CNI / Kubenet |
Node Management AWS Karpenter is the industry gold standard for reactive autoscaling. | Managed Node Groups / Karpenter | Autopilot / Node Pools | Virtual Nodes / VMSS |
Pricing AKS offers a free control plane for small clusters without an SLA. | $0.10/hr + Infra | $0.10/hr + Infra (Autopilot differs) | Free Control Plane Tier |
IAM Integration All three have robust ways to map K8s service accounts to cloud roles. | IRSA (Deeply integrated) | Workload Identity | Entra ID (Azure AD) |
Comparing the automation, pricing, and regional availability of AWS, GCP, and Azure.
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