KOPS over AWS EKS or vice versa

Question

I came across an open source Kubernetes project KOPS and AWS Kubernetes service EKS. Both these products allow installation of a Kubernetes cluster. However, I wonder why one would pick EKS over KOPS or vice versa if one has not run any of them earlier.

This question does not ask which one is better, but rather asks for a comparison.

Kops is not provided by AWS. It is an independent project on github: https://github.com/kubernetes/kops — user152468, Feb 05 '19 at 12:44

score 29 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 20 '18 at 15:21

The two are largely the same, at the time of writing, the following are the differences I'm aware of between the 2 offerings

EKS:

Fully managed control plane from AWS - you have no control over the masters
AWS native authentication IAM authentication with the cluster
VPC level networking for pods meaning you can use things like security groups at the cluster/pod level

kops:

Support for more Kubernetes features, such as API server options
Auto provisioned nodes use the built in kops node_up tool
More flexibility over Kubernetes versions, EKS only has a few versions available right now

How about the performance characteristic on EKS over the kops? As the EKS use VPC level networking for pods, so I think it will use less roundstrip than kops (request need to reach node then forward to pod) — pham cuong, May 07 '19 at 09:49

score 7 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 07 '19 at 19:18

7

Other significant difference is that EKS is an AWS product so you require an AWS account but kops allows to run Kubernetes in AWS but also in GCE and DigitalOcean.

answered Apr 07 '19 at 19:18

user9269906

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KOPS over AWS EKS or vice versa

2 Answers2