Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service vs Kubernetes

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.

Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It supports stateless, stateful, and data-processing workloads, and can run locally, in a cloud, or in a datacenter; users can also choose a managed service rather than operate a cluster themselves. It coordinates gradual updates while monitoring application health and can roll back a change if something goes wrong. Pods receive IP addresses and groups of Pods can share a DNS name, with load balancing across them. Kubernetes can mount storage from local, public-cloud, or network systems such as iSCSI or NFS. Secrets and configuration can be updated without rebuilding images. Scaling can be manual or automatic based on CPU use. Security mechanisms include Secrets, Pod security standards, RuntimeClasses, network policies, admission controllers, and audit logging. Kubernetes is free, with a listed plan price of free. It does not include application-level services such as databases, message buses, caches, or cluster storage systems.