Kubernetes on Google, Azure and AWS Compared

&gt; Azure is something I’ve avoided since using it for a few months last year. I was working as a Microsoft partner so it was unavoidable back then. Parts of it are alright but the user experience coming from an Amazon background is worlds apart.<p>Wat? IMO, the Azure portal is <i>amazing</i> to work with, especially compared to the old-fangled, inconsistent UI that AWS provides.<p>&gt; Show them how some things on Azure need to be done in a clunky web UI<p>Years ago, this was true, but it hasn&#x27;t been for a long time - the Azure web UI of today is fast, consistent and looks great.<p>&gt; some things on Azure need to be done in a clunky web UI, other things need Powershell and other random stuff uses the CLI<p>I&#x27;ve been using Azure for years, and I&#x27;m not aware of anything that can only be done in the UI. I also don&#x27;t believe there is anything that only works with Powershell, or only works with the CLI.<p>&gt; how that effects the design of DevOps pipelines and automation in general. Yes, you can make it work, but why make life hard for yourself<p>Eh? Azure DevOps pipelines are great to work with, and there&#x27;s a huge library of tasks available.<p>After reading this, it doesn&#x27;t sound like the author has actually worked with Azure recently, so I&#x27;m really not sure why he bothered including it in this article.

Interesting post. I&#x27;m a Linux guy but i&#x27;m in a new job so having to ramp up on Azure DevOps. Looked good at first, I actually praised Microsoft but:<p>1. Creating a project timed out after 5 minutes or so. This was in the gui, but had no adblocker or anything similar. Refreshed page = no project. 2. Went to a different machine, logged in, no project still. 3. Went to original machine - refreshed - no project. Logged out and back in again - project was there.<p>Azure DevOps was awesome at first but I can not trust something like this when I work with it all day.

Fully agree with his comments as someone who&#x27;s used GKE, AKS, EKS and Hetzner for kubernetes clusters.<p>GCP&#x27;s UX is so nice... e.g. compare the equivalent as command line option in the UI vs the automation script that Azure gives you.

Author here.<p>I can say that this has pretty much gone as I&#x27;d expected.<p>Microsoft have 80,000+ developers. Their partner ecosystem is absolutely massive. I&#x27;ve watched them hire hundreds of developer advocates that talk at events. It&#x27;s therefore quite hard to write anything online that&#x27;s critical without at least half of the comments coming from a biased source.<p>It is interesting to see the gap between views in the comments here.<p>Edit: I watch this comment go up and down a lot as the vote battle between those with an agenda and those without click against each other.<p>Weirdly, I did criticise AWS a bit for their EKS offering in the blog but I&#x27;ve not had anywhere near the toxicity from people about that.

I tried Azure lately – it felt like I booted into Windows 98. I couldn&#x27;t stand it. A lot of the CLI UX was buggy for me too.<p>AWS works. A lot of the UI is dated but the new designs are nice.<p>GCP is the best. Google has done a great job on Dev UX both CLI and Web Console.

A little of topic because it’s not a comparison : Recently had my first experience using gke ( and kubernetes in general), and although i managed to get something working in the end i would say it’s still pretty rough...<p>Documentation is a mess : the general layout for google cloud is really a pain to read and navigate, but in addition to that you often have to jump between kubernetes doc and google doc, with some information being on both. Don’t do that please : either make it obvious that people need to get familiar with certain chapters of kube doc, or provide all the info ( me preference would actually go to the first option..)<p>It’s quite hard to guess what you can do on the gke web interface and what you can’t. You can feel it’s meant for people that really know kubernetes, and not people who discover both gke and kubernetes at the same time.<p>And for the life of me i couldn’t get the load balancer manage https. I’ve read this was possible, but never saw the actual page explaining how. I ended up using cloudfront but lost the ability to see end user ip in my logs in the process. ( also logging is a real beast to tame on its own, with no obvious way to know what is available by default, what is a paid option, what should be configured on the stackdriver website, and what should be coded )

&quot;As it stands today I’ve personally used EKS, and AWS in general a lot. I’ve used GKE a bit but only with my own personal credits doing Kubernetes The Hard Way and spinning up a very quick GKE test cluster a while ago.&quot;<p>&quot;I’m being serious when I say this: if the company I’m working for decided to migrate to Azure I’d find a new job.&quot;<p>&quot;It needs to be fast and bug free so that I can build cool automation on top. Working on something like Azure, especially after having worked on AWS for years, would be extremely depressing.&quot;<p>If the article is supposed to be an _unbiased_ comparison between cloud hosted Kubernetes providers, I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s a bit of a fail. For some it would be completely different experience because they have experience with Microsoft technologies. And those people might as well quit if their company moves to AWS or a non-Azure platform.

&gt; Networking is the other reason. Google is miles ahead of everyone here. Similar story with HA and scaling.<p>Does anyone know what the author is referring to with this claim? I don&#x27;t see anything in the sheet to back this up. At least from a high level, all three options support network policies via CNI, and GKE and EKS use the same one, Calico.

I&#x27;m curious how the digital ocean offering compares. I think it&#x27;s in limited availability now.

My company is in the process of migrating off of a managed kubernetes provider. Sure, it&#x27;s nice to have someone else manage the operations of the master. At the same time, a single customer is entirely insignificant to them.<p>We&#x27;ve experienced multiple outages from forced upgrades. We usually can find out the reason through github, but it may not be a priority for them to provide the fix. If they do, it could take days or weeks for it to become available. Much revenue has been lost because they can&#x27;t do something at the speed which we could do it.

We are preparing to move to Google. Our app is CPU intensive and a killer feature was the ability to spec nodes with a lot of cores and little RAM. We save a lot of money by not paying for RAM we dont need. Google also had a location in LA and we are in LA. 5ms to our cloud is nice.

&gt;Show them how some things on Azure need to be done in a clunky web UI, other things need Powershell and other random stuff uses the CLI.<p>This, at least, is wrong. Everything related to Azure&#x27;s hosted Kubernetes can be done via the CLI without ever touching the web portal or PS.

After several weeks of swimming upstream on a greenfield EKS project I switched gears to GKE. The paradigm just felt way better. For large enterprises that need IAM integration on EKS I suppose that wouldn’t have been an option but GKE just feels way more paradigmatic, for obvious reasons.<p>Did I mention we are hiring devops engineers? If you are a kubernetes guru email me :-)

The service that launched on Azure in 2017 was ACS (Azure Container Service), which is very different from what AKS is today.

Slightly unrelated, but what would be the best way to migrate a kubernetes application from one cloud to the other?

Anyone here want to share their experiences running k8s on IBM Bluemix (formerly Softlayer)?

His hatred for Azure ruins the article. There seems to be a massive correlation at the moment between Kubernetes and hyped up magpie egomaniac developers.

Good post, Steven. Keep going..

For &quot;Maximum pods per node&quot;, it shows GKE at 100, AKS at 110 but still puts GKE in green. How come?