Kubernetes continues to win over enterprise customers. A recent survey found that more than 80 percent of IT professionals and teams reported deploying container technologies — up from 58 percent in 2017. With this increased adoption the number of choices available for managing containerized architectures across multiple hybrid clouds has also increased. It quickly becomes difficult to keep track of each service and what they’re best used for. As a complex container orchestration tool, Kubernetes brings many benefits to organizations managing containers at scale, but which version will pay off for enterprise adopters?

In our upcoming webinar on Thursday, March 28 at 11:00am P.T. with Jim Bugwadia, co-founder and CEO and myself, we will look at container services from the top cloud providers and break down the main use case for each. Register here to join.

While there are several solutions in the market, we’ll focus on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) from Google, Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) from Amazon and Azure Container Service (AKS) from Microsoft.

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is Google Cloud’s fully managed solution to manage and deploy containers via Kubernetes container orchestration service. It was started in 2014 and was the earliest market entrant that more deeply integrates provided the deepest integration with the Kubernetes orchestration platform. You pay for the Google Compute Engine instances used, with no additional charges.

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS)

Seeking to meet demands to simplify Kubernetes cluster management, Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) was released to general availability in June 2018. EKS is AWS’s service to manage and deploy containers via Kubernetes container orchestration service. Much of EKS’ early customer base — such as GoDaddy, Intuit and Snap — ran Kubernetes on EC2 instances. Given its use of open source Kubernetes, EKS enables users to manually migrate workloads between environments with minimal or no changes, but it doesn’t provide the automation needed for a true hybrid deployment. Pricing is $0.20 per hour for each EKS cluster, as well as the cost of AWS resources such as EC2 instances that you create to run your Kubernetes worker nodes.

Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) started in 2017 and is Azure’s fully managed solution to manage and deploy containers via Kubernetes container orchestration service. AKS seeks to entice Microsoft and multi-cloud users.  You pay only for the VMs, storage, and networking resources used for the Kubernetes cluster, with no additional charge.

Here are some rough figures though to help you determine costs when choosing a Kubernetes platform. This cost comparison assumes that you have 5 master nodes, 15 worker nodes, and each node has 4 vCPU and 16GB of RAM

GKE	EKS	AKS
$0.19 per hour	$0.20 per hour	$0.20 per hour
10,800 compute hours	14,440 compute hours	14,440 compute hours
$2,052 per month ($1,539 with discounts)	$2,880 per month	$2,880 per month

Organizations adopt containers toimprove portability across public and private clouds. Since AKS, EKS and GKE are all based on open source Kubernetes, it lowers the barrier to moving workloads around in a hybrid cloud and makes cloud computing management easier. Each has unique configuration details and cloud service interfaces, which can hinder managing your operations. This is where Nirmata comes in. To mitigate these challenges, a cloud-agnostic Kubernetes platform, such as Nirmata can help, especially if you want to use Kubernetes in a multi-cloud environment.

Want to learn more? Watch our video on Containers for going Cloud-native here. Ready to engage with us – we’d love to talk! Please contact us hereto get started with Nirmata.