EKS vs AKS vs GKE: An Honest Comparison From Running All Three in Production

Short summary

A practitioner comparison of Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, and Google GKE based on real production experience across cost, networking, and day-2 operations. GKE is the most polished with the least operational toil; EKS offers the deepest cloud ecosystem and best autoscaling via Karpenter; AKS provides a free control plane and unmatched Entra ID integration for Microsoft enterprises. Control-plane fees are noise — the real cost drivers are node efficiency, autoscaling behavior, and engineering hours spent on operations.

• •GKE is most automated and polished; EKS has deepest ecosystem and Karpenter; AKS excels for Microsoft enterprises with free control plane
• •Networking diverges most: EKS VPC CNI risks IP exhaustion, GKE ships Cilium out-of-box, AKS offers multiple CNI modes with decision fatigue
• •Control-plane costs are negligible; real savings come from node efficiency, autoscaling, and reduced operational toil

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.