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Kubernetes may provide an abundance of benefits, but those who are using it may be well aware that it often requires quite a bit (or even a lot!) of effort and skill to run the platform independently. So – rather than having to put up with it on their own, organizations are able to pay for a managed Kubernetes service instead.
This is where Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) come in. GKE, AKS, and EKS are the three leading managed Kubernetes services that enable organizations to outsource their Kubernetes (K8s) needs to a third-party vendor that takes responsibility for setting up, maintaining, and upgrading Kubernetes.
The need for managed Kubernetes
Kubernetes is a popular container orchestration platform that provides a rich set of features, including self-recovery, workload management, batch execution, and progressive application deployment.
The main advantage of Kubernetes is that it enables organizations to automate container orchestration tasks to ensure effectiveness and developer productivity. However, automating these tasks requires a lot of work, and the Kubernetes learning curve is steep. A managed Kubernetes service helps organizations set up and operate their Kubernetes workloads.
Managed Kubernetes benefits
A managed Kubernetes vendor may offer various services, such as hosting infrastructure with pre-configured environments, full Kubernetes hosting and operations, and dedicated support. The vendor does much (or all) of the grunt work, including configurations, and may also guide their customers through the decision-making process.
Once the initial setup is operational, a managed Kubernetes vendor provides tools to automate routine processes, including scaling, updates, monitoring, and load-balancing. Managed Kubernetes vendors that offer a hosting platform typically manage the underlying infrastructure, including configuration and maintenance.
This is part of our series of guides about Kubernetes troubleshooting.
GKE is an orchestration and management system for Docker containers and container clusters running on public Google Cloud services. GKE is based on Kubernetes, which was initially developed by Google and later released as an open source project.
GKE employs Kubernetes to manage clusters, ensuring organizations can easily deploy clusters using features like pre-configured workload settings and auto-scaling. GKE does most of the cluster configuration, enabling organizations to use regular Kubernetes commands to deploy and manage applications, set up policies, and monitor workloads.
AKS manages hosted Kubernetes environments and provides capabilities that simplify the deployment and management of containerized applications in the Azure cloud.
The AKS environment includes many features, including automated updates, easy scaling, and self-healing. AKS manages the Kubernetes cluster master for free, expecting organizations to manage the agent nodes in their cluster. AKS bills only for the VMs the organization’s nodes run on.
You can create a cluster using the Azure CLI or the Azure portal. Once you create a cluster, you can use Azure Resource Manager templates to automate Kubernetes cluster creation. These templates let you specify various aspects, including networking, monitoring, and Azure Active Directory (AD) integration. AKS uses these specs when automating cluster deployment.
Amazon EKS enables organizations to easily run Kubernetes on-premises and in the AWS cloud. Amazon EKS is a certified Kubernetes-conformant, ensuring that existing applications running on upstream Kubernetes are also compatible with Amazon EKS.
Amazon EKS automatically manages the scalability and availability of any Kubernetes control plane nodes in charge of key tasks like scheduling containers, storing cluster data, and managing application availability.
A service level agreement (SLA) is a contract between a vendor and customers that specifies the services provided by the vendor. Cloud providers offer different SLAs that guarantee uptimes based on the vendor’s availability zones and regions.
Uptime SLAs offered by the three providers:
All three providers offer a managed version of the Kubernetes control plane, which manages infrastructure and performs essential processes required to run Kubernetes worker nodes. The key difference relates to pricing:
Except for specific charges for the Kubernetes control plane (see the section above), all three providers do not charge extra for the managed Kubernetes service itself. Instead, users pay for the cloud resources used by their Kubernetes clusters, such as cloud instances / VMs, virtual private clouds (VPCs) and data transfer, according to each cloud provider’s regular pricing.
Kubernetes can seamlessly scale nodes, ensuring the cluster can optimally use resources. This feature helps save time and reduce costs, automatically provisioning the appropriate amount of resources for each workload.
All three solutions support common operating systems including Windows and Linux. In addition:
A bare metal cluster is deployed on a cloud architecture without a virtualization layer (VMs). It helps reduce infrastructure overhead significantly and provides application deployments with access to more storage and computing resources. As a result, it increases the overall computing power, helping reduce downtime and latency for application requests.
Here are how the three providers handle bare metal clusters:
Each cloud vendor offers its own container image service, integrated with its respective managed Kubernetes service:
All three providers configure Kubernetes deployments with default role-based access control (RBAC), and allow you to limit network access to the Kubernetes API endpoint of your cluster.
However, RBAC and secure authentication do not protect the API server, exposing it to attacks attempting to compromise the cluster. You must apply a classless inter-domain routing allowlist or give the API an internal, private IP address to protect against compromised cluster credentials.
Beyond this, here are the key differences between the providers:
AKS
EKS
GKE
Regardless of which Kubernetes Managed Service provider an organization uses, the troubleshooting process remains complex and, without the right tools, can be stressful, ineffective, and time-consuming. Some best practices can help minimize the chances of things breaking down, but eventually, something will go wrong – simply because it can.
This is the reason why we created Komodor, a tool that helps dev and ops teams stop wasting their precious time looking for needles in (hay)stacks every time things go wrong.
Acting as a single source of truth (SSOT) for all of your k8s troubleshooting needs, Komodor offers:
If you are interested in checking out Komodor, use this link to sign up for a Free Trial.
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