Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service - Not the portability you think

When most people think about K8s, they think about application portability. EKS is more about leveraging development process portability.

Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) aims to embrace application portability, right? If you’ve been following the AWS Everyday series, you’ll understand a feature of every AWS product is to help you consume more AWS. EKS is no exception.

The target customer of EKS is the cloud consumer that wants to adopt Cloud-Native Computing Foundation development patterns on top of Amazon Web Services.

How is this different than other Kubernetes (K8s) approaches? When you look to something like OpenShift, you want to abstract the development infrastructure from the development platform. IE, you’ve standardized on OpenShift. It doesn’t matter if that platform runs on Azure, AWS, or on-premises. Your operations are standardized on a single platform.

EKS is for customers wanting to take their preferred K8s-based development workflow and run it on AWS. You want to use something that is a first-class citizen of Amazon’s AIM, KMS, Route53, and Certificate Management solutions.

When considering EKS vs. an OpenShift, ask who is my primary development and operations relationship with.