Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service vs K3s

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a managed Kubernetes service for building, running, and scaling production applications across cloud, on-premises, and edge environments. It manages Kubernetes control-plane availability across three AWS Availability Zones and replaces unhealthy control-plane nodes automatically. Applications can run on Amazon EC2 or AWS Fargate. EKS Auto Mode automates provisioning for compute, storage, and networking, along with scaling, operating-system patching, and add-on management. Hybrid deployments can use Hybrid Nodes, AWS Outposts, or EKS Anywhere. EKS remains compatible with upstream Kubernetes applications and tools, and integrates with IAM role-based access control, VPC pod networking, and Application Load Balancers. EKS Capabilities provides managed Argo CD for GitOps across clusters. There are no minimum fees or upfront commitments, but worker resources and related traffic are billed separately. Standard version support is $0.10 a month, billed per cluster hour.

K3s is a certified, lightweight Kubernetes distribution for IoT and edge computing. It runs self-hosted on Linux and is released for x86_64, ARMv7, and ARM64. The distribution arrives as one binary or a minimal container image; the site describes the binary as under 70 MB, while documentation says under 100 MB. Documented uses include edge systems, homelabs, IoT, continuous integration, development, ARM single-board computers, air-gapped environments, and embedded Kubernetes. SQLite is the default datastore, with etcd, MySQL, and Postgres available. K3s packages containerd or cri-dockerd, Flannel, CoreDNS, Traefik, ServiceLB, Kube-router, local-path-provisioner, and Spegel. High-availability deployments can use embedded storage or external MySQL, PostgreSQL, or etcd. Air-gapped installation supports private registries, manually deployed images, or an embedded registry mirror. Security guidance includes hardening and CIS self-assessment material. Automated Kubernetes-native upgrades use Rancher’s system-upgrade-controller.