Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) is a fully managed service for running Kubernetes on AWS without managing the Kubernetes control plane yourself. Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, often using Docker.
Key Characteristics
- Managed Kubernetes control plane with high availability across multiple AWS Availability Zones.
- Alternative to Amazon ECS with different APIs and abstractions but the same goal of orchestrating containers.
- Two compute options:
- EC2 launch type – run your own worker nodes with full infrastructure control.
- Fargate launch type – run containers serverlessly without managing nodes.
Use Cases
- Ideal for organizations already using Kubernetes on-premises or across multiple clouds.
- Suitable for multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud strategies due to Kubernetes’ portability.
Additional Notes
- Multi-region setups require one EKS cluster per AWS region.
- Use CloudWatch Container Insights for logs and metrics collection.
- Fully compatible with standard Kubernetes tooling and ecosystem.
Key Benefit: Enables Kubernetes workloads on AWS with reduced operational overhead while maintaining portability.