EKS vs AKS vs GKE is really three comparisons in one: cost, networking, and day-2 operations. We have run production workloads on all three managed Kubernetes services — Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, and Google GKE — and they all pass conformance tests and run the same YAML. Yet the day-2 experience — the upgrades, the networking incidents, the 2am pages — is very different on each. This is the comparison we wish someone had written for us: no vendor marketing, just what matters when you are choosing where your clusters will live for the next five years.

TL;DR — GKE is the most polished and most automated: choose it if you are cloud-flexible and want the least toil. EKS is the least managed but sits inside the deepest cloud ecosystem: choose it if you are AWS-committed. AKS lands in the middle, with unbeatable Entra ID integration and a free control plane: choose it if you are a Microsoft enterprise. The Kubernetes API is the same everywhere. Everything around it is not.

EKS vs AKS vs GKE at a glance

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