AKS for Amazon EKS professionals

This series of articles guides Amazon EKS professionals that want to learn about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). This series evaluates the core similarities and differences between both managed Kubernetes platforms. The scope includes both EKS Standard and EKS Auto Mode, and similar offerings within AKS Standard and AKS Automatic.

The articles compare AKS with Amazon EKS in the following Kubernetes design areas:

• Workload identity and access
• Cluster logging and monitoring
• Secure API server access
• Storage options
• Cost optimization and management
• Agent node and node pool management
• Cluster governance

For greenfield AKS implementations, see Baseline architecture for an AKS cluster. To build a foundational understanding of AKS, review Get started with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

Both Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) provide a managed Kubernetes environment that reduces the complexity of operating Kubernetes clusters. Azure and AWS offer multiple solutions for running container-based workloads. These articles don't compare the other Azure and AWS container hosts. These articles also don't include hybrid options such as AWS Outposts or Azure Local and Red Hat OpenShift offerings, such as Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) or Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO).

For more information about other Azure services that can host containerized workloads, see the following articles:

• Choose an Azure compute service
• Choose an Azure container service
• Compare Container Apps with other Azure container options
• General architectural considerations to choose an Azure container service

Migration resources

The following resources help you plan and carry out a migration from Amazon EKS to AKS:

• Migrate from Amazon EKS to AKS: Strategies to migrate typical stateless and stateful workloads from EKS to AKS, including container image migration, Kubernetes manifest adaptation, and data migration.

• Migrate compute from AWS to Azure: A catalog of compute migration scenarios, including EKS-to-AKS scenarios. Examples of such scenarios include:

  • Migrate an AWS event-driven workload to AKS: A step-by-step scenario for migrating an EKS event-driven workload that uses KEDA and Karpenter to AKS.

  • Migrate an EKS web application to AKS: A step-by-step scenario for migrating an EKS web application with AWS WAF to AKS with Azure Web Application Firewall.

Contributors

Microsoft maintains this article. The following contributors wrote this article.

Principal authors:

• Paolo Salvatori | Principal Service Engineer
• Laura Nicolas | Senior Cloud Solution Architect
• Pranab Paul | Senior Global Partner Solution Architect

Other contributors:

• Chad Kittel | Principal Software Engineer - Azure Patterns & Practices
• Theano Petersen | Technical Writer

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Next steps

• Baseline architecture for an AKS cluster