Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Alternatives

4.6(72 Ratings)

Container Management

Considering alternatives to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)? See what this market Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) users also considered in their purchasing decision. When evaluating different solutions, potential buyers compare competencies in categories such as evaluation and contracting, integration and deployment, service and support, and specific product capabilities.

Check out real reviews verified by Gartner to see how Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) compares to its competitors and find the best software or service for your organization.

Reviewed in Last 12 Months

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1. Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)

By Amazon Web Services (AWS)

4.6

Our journey with Amazon ECS has been overwhelmingly positive, leading to a high recommendation and satisfaction rating. I would rate my overall experience with Amazon ECS as excellent. A couple of years ago, we made the strategic decision to transition to AWS, driven by the desire to leverage containerized services as extensively as possible. As one of the decision-makers, I was able to guide many of these choices. We ultimately selected ECS because of its "good mix of usability and scalability". A key factor in our selection was that ECS is a "very proven, very well documented, very well understood service from AWS". This provided a significant level of comfort from a business standpoint, as our existing staff were already familiar with AWS services, and I was confident that we could easily hire new team members who would also be proficient with it. It struck the right balance, being "not an outdated tech and it wasn't a bleeding edge tech" that would necessitate finding a highly niche specialist. Furthermore, the "cost, the pricing model and the cost were very easy to estimate", offering clear insight into our needs and the associated expenses in a pay-for-what-you-use cloud environment. This financial transparency was a major advantage. When evaluating solutions, we juxtaposed ECS against Kubernetes. As the CTO of a small and growing company, I recognized that Kubernetes, while offering "a lot of capabilities and a lot of complexity," and providing "customization and in really deep control" for larger organizations where I had previously utilized it, was not the ideal fit for our current structure. For our small company, I needed "the comfort and reliability of a more simple model". This choice also influenced our hiring strategy; I sought individuals who were comfortable in smaller companies, rather than those from "gigantic scale ups or from larger enterprise companies" accustomed to Kubernetes' inherent complexity. Therefore, the decision for ECS was deeply correlated with both the technical service's capabilities and the type of company and individual we intended to hire. The internal adoption of ECS was remarkably smooth. The excellent nature of containerization services, including ECS, lies in "the ability to have a development environment that can ultimately be used in a lot of different production containerization solutions". This meant our development environment was "not really disrupted". We only required one person on our team to dedicate "a week or two" to learn how to bridge the gap between local containers, such as Docker Desktop, and getting our containers built and deployed in ECS. Consequently, I did not have to train the entire team upfront. Adoption was "very easy because it's well documented," allowing one person to get deeply up to speed, and then, "over the next month everybody else was able to basically read the documentation and converse about the process," leading to "very organic, very internal training oriented" adoption. Measuring ROI is always a complex endeavor, but we have successfully "been able to continue to hit kind of our cost estimates". We have not encountered any "unforeseen issues," and our "upfront justification and planning has borne out success with ECS". We consider our ROI achieved because our estimates regarding time, complexity, and cost have "aligned with the reality". Crucially, we have avoided "production outages," "unforeseen costs," or the need to "panic, hire an experts to fix some odd issue". Our ability to "staff up train and implement on schedule" signifies that we have met our ROI objectives. Regarding scalability, ECS performs admirably with our business growth. We have not needed to make any upgrades, expansions, or modifications to the core service post-implementation. A significant advantage of ECS is that AWS undertakes "the vast majority of core infrastructure maintenance and monitoring and upgrades". This allows us to focus entirely on "monitor our own our applications that run inside them," which is a core strength of the platform. This means we "don't have to think about a lot of those, a lot of the upgrades and maintenance cost or complexity". Our decision to purchase ECS was primarily driven by the goal of "improving business process outcomes" and "creating internal operation efficiencies". Key factors that drove this decision included "financial organisational viability" and "product functionality and performance".Read all insights and reviews for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)

Where Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Scored Higher

Easier to integrate and deploy

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2. Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)

By Amazon Web Services (AWS)

4.5

My overall experience with Amazon EKS has been highly positive. I was involved in the decision-making process, and my team acts as an end-user, relying on EKS for efficient pod management. Prior to adopting EKS approximately four to five months ago, we utilized Amazon's Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) for pod management. This approach, however, proved to be more akin to static pod management, which presented challenges when dealing with sudden increases in load, such as thousands of transactions per second. This static nature was not conducive to handling dynamic load variations effectively, often leading to queuing experiences for users. The transition to EKS was driven by the need for a more dynamic and robust solution capable of managing operational heavy lifting outside the direct context of developers. EKS, as a service, offers flexible options for nodes, allowing us to choose between self-managed nodes, Fargate instances, or managed nodes, among other configurations. Having prior experience with non-managed Kubernetes implementations, the Amazon-managed version of Kubernetes offered by EKS was a significant advantage, aligning with our existing use of Amazon managed services at our organisation. Key factors in our selection of EKS included its seamless integration with other AWS services, which was paramount given our existing AWS infrastructure. We sought easy access to networking components such as Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), load balancers, and security groups, essential for thousands of servers running and interacting with new pods managed by EKS. The "plug and play" nature of EKS, particularly its integration with the Kubernetes Role-Based Access Control system, simplifies identity and access management through Amazon, eliminating the need to rely on external vendors for IAM roles and permissions. This design was a primary reason for our adoption of EKS. Our internal adoption process was meticulous and successful. As part of a centralized infra team and a dedicated DevOps team, we conducted a Proof of Concept (POC) within our team. During this POC, we implemented a service on EKS that was previously running on ASGs, our previous Amazon product. We ran parallel services, for example, running the US region on ECS and Europe on EKS, for a week to gather comparative data. The results were then showcased to various leaders across 25-30 different groups, demonstrating cost optimization, technology innovation, monitoring cost, efficiency, response time, and overall AWS service costs. This approach facilitated adoption across multiple teams, though some are still in the process of implementation. Measuring the Return on Investment (ROI) of EKS involves several critical metrics. We assess the cost of infrastructure for running the same load compared to other solutions, aiming for significant cost reductions (e.g., from $1000 on ECS to $700 on EKS). Second, we evaluate the capability of the infrastructure to handle burst loads – situations where load increases substantially – ensuring it can still manage all requests. Third, we consider how frequently the service provider, Amazon, supports advancements in technology and new versions. These three metrics guide our evaluation and adoption of new services. In terms of scalability, EKS performs exceptionally well. Once the architectural decisions regarding deployment are made, changes are minimal. The primary areas for adjustment are updates to the base templates, known as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). For instance, if an AMI version changes, revisions may be necessary. Otherwise, services are scaled by updating configurations (e.g., YAML files) to adjust the number of pods. If a service needs to handle more load, we can simply increase the maximum number of pods, from say, 1 to 1000 replicas, and EKS automatically spins up the necessary instances, eliminating manual deployments. Once templates are sorted, there's generally no need for significant changes unless there is a version upgrade on EKS, which might incur support costs for legacy versions.Read all insights and reviews for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)

Where Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Scored Higher

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3. AWS Fargate

By Amazon Web Services (AWS)

4.6

Our overall experience has been smooth as a small startup, as it lets us run ECS tasks without worrying about provisioning or maintaining EC2 instances. It integrates very well with our existing AWS stack as well. It's a good booster at the start, but costs can spike with long-running workloads Read all insights and reviews for AWS Fargate

Where Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Scored Higher

Easier to integrate and deploy

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4. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

4.5

My overall experience with Google Kubernetes Engine has been very positive. GKE makes managing Kubernetes clusters much easier than running them on-prem or manually in the cloud.Read all insights and reviews for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

Where Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Scored Higher

Easier to integrate and deploy

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5. VMware Tanzu Platform

By Broadcom (VMware)

4.4

VMWare Tanzu Platform offers strong Kubernetes management and scalability, but its complexity is challenging. Especially for the initial setup and integrations, but luckily the documentation is clear.Read all insights and reviews for VMware Tanzu Platform

Where Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Scored Higher

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6. SUSE Rancher

4.5

SUSE have been fantastic to work with, our working relationship is strong and they have always delivered on the promises that they have made to us. Highly rate the account management and support. Support is also fantastic, they are knowledgeable and deliver exceptional levels of outcomes Read all insights and reviews for SUSE Rancher

Where Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Scored Higher

Better at service and support
Easier to integrate and deploy
Better evaluation and contracting

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7. Portainer

4.8

Extremely easy to implement, easy to use UI and a must for both personal and professional use.Read all insights and reviews for Portainer

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8. Huawei Cloud Container Engine

4.6

Together with Huawei, we have had a great experience using CCE. This has allowed us to deploy our artifacts while Huawei handles the entire orchestration layer. The nodes in Huawei can scale up and down elastically. Huawei has enabled us to accelerate our time to market and take advantage of the benefits of portability and scalability, providing a high degree of flebilibity. Our microservices have performed well, and for us, the use of Kubernetes has been seamless. Read all insights and reviews for Huawei Cloud Container Engine

Where Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Scored Higher

Easier to integrate and deploy

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