Amazon EKS vs Azure AKS
Both are managed Kubernetes offerings that handle control-plane operations for you — upgrades, etcd, scheduler, API server availability. The meaningful differences are in cost structure, how cluster auth integrates with the rest of the cloud, and default networking behavior, not in Kubernetes itself (both run genuine upstream Kubernetes).
| Aspect | Amazon EKS | Azure AKS |
|---|---|---|
| Control plane cost | Charged hourly per cluster, in addition to worker node costs. | The control plane itself is free — you only pay for the worker nodes (and any add-ons you enable). |
| Cluster authentication | Integrates with AWS IAM — access is granted via IAM users/roles and EKS access entries (or the older aws-iam-authenticator). | Integrates with Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) — access is granted via Azure RBAC or Kubernetes RBAC tied to Entra identities. |
| Pod networking (default) | AWS VPC CNI — pods get real VPC IP addresses by default, which simplifies some networking but consumes VPC IP space per pod. | Choice of kubenet (simpler, pod IPs not directly routable) or Azure CNI (pods get VNet IPs, closer to EKS's default model). |
| Serverless / no-node-management option | Fargate profiles — run specific pods on Fargate without managing EC2 nodes for them. | Virtual nodes, backed by Azure Container Instances, for burstable capacity without pre-provisioned nodes. |
| Native monitoring/logging | Pairs with CloudWatch Container Insights. | Pairs with Azure Monitor for containers. |
| Ingress | AWS Load Balancer Controller is the common path to ALB/NLB-backed ingress. | Application Gateway Ingress Controller (AGIC) is the common path to Azure Application Gateway–backed ingress. |
The practical takeaway
This is realistically decided by which cloud the rest of your infrastructure already lives in — the Kubernetes experience itself is close enough that migrating workloads between them is mostly a networking/auth exercise, not a rearchitecture. If cost-sensitivity around small clusters matters and you're Azure-native, AKS's free control plane is a real, measurable saving; if you're already deep in AWS IAM and VPC design, EKS integrates more naturally there.
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