Which Kubernetes flavor is best for SREs? While there is no definitive answer, let’s explore five of the most popular Kubernetes services, and examine how …
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Kubernetes in general is a boon for SREs. By making it easy to manage microservices-based apps at scale, Kubernetes helps SRE teams achieve reliability goals for complex, cloud-native environments. But if you know anything about Kubernetes, you know that there are a number of different Kubernetes distributions and services available, each with different strengths and weaknesses. That begs the question: Which Kubernetes flavor is best for SREs? While there is no definitive answer, let’s explore five of the most popular Kubernetes services — Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, Google Cloud GKE, SUSE Rancher, and Red Hat OpenShift — and examine how they stack up on the reliability engineering front. While a comprehensive overview of each of these Kubernetes flavors is behind the scope of this article, here’s a rundown of what each has to offer SREs in particular. EKS, the managed Kubernetes service offered by the AWS Cloud, automates Kubernetes cluster setup. It also provides some tools to help manage Kubernetes itself, although the fact that Amazon markets it as a ‚managed service‘ doesn’t mean that customers don’t have to manage anything themselves. From a reliability standpoint, one of the major advantages of EKS is that it’s available in a relatively wide selection of cloud regions. They include two GovCloud regions, which is ideal for businesses that need to meet tight compliance requirements in addition to steep reliability goals. Amazon also supports hybrid environments based on EKS via both EKS Anywhere and Outposts. This is useful from a reliability perspective because it makes it possible to spread Kubernetes clusters across cloud-based and on-prem infrastructure, which helps to protect against outages in the event that one part of the infrastructure fails.
