EKS vs GKE vs AKS in 2026: What We Tell Our Clients
By Motti Dadison · October 13, 2026 · 6 min read
All three managed Kubernetes services are mature. The real differences are cost model, how much operations work they leave to you, and how they fit your cloud. A practical comparison and the advice we give clients.
"Which managed Kubernetes should we use?" is one of the first questions new clients ask us. The honest answer is that all three, Amazon EKS, Google GKE and Azure AKS, are mature and run serious production workloads. The differences are in cost model, how much operations work they leave to you, and how well they fit the rest of your cloud.
This article compares them in the areas that matter most in practice, and ends with the advice we give clients. Prices and features are correct at the time of writing; all three providers change them often, so check the current documentation before you decide.
The short answer
Already on AWS? Use EKS. The integration with IAM, VPC and the rest of AWS is more important than any difference between the Kubernetes services.
Already on Azure, or a Microsoft company? Use AKS, for the same reason, plus Microsoft Entra ID integration.
Starting from zero, and you want the least operations work? GKE, and especially GKE Autopilot, is the most "hands-off" of the three.
The Kubernetes service almost never justifies moving your whole cloud. Choose your cloud first, then use its Kubernetes service.
Control plane cost
For one or two clusters, the control plane fee (about $73 per month per cluster) is not important. It matters when you run many small clusters, for example one per team or per customer. In that case, think about fewer, shared clusters with namespaces and policies.
On EKS, watch the extended support price. A cluster that falls behind on upgrades costs six times more, about $438 per month instead of $73.
How much of the cluster they manage for you
All three now offer two styles:
Standard mode: the provider runs the control plane; you choose and manage node pools, autoscaling and add-ons.
Fully managed mode: the provider also manages nodes. These are GKE Autopilot , EKS Auto Mode and AKS Automatic .
GKE Autopilot is the most mature of the three. You pay for the CPU and memory that your pods request, not for nodes, so there is no waste from half-empty nodes. The trade-off is less control: some privileged workloads and node-level customisation are not allowed.
EKS Auto Mode runs Karpenter and core add-ons for you, on normal EC2 instances, with a management fee per instance on top of the EC2 price. AKS Automatic gives a similar pre-configured setup on Azure.
Our view: fully managed modes are a very good default for small teams without a dedicated platform engineer. Teams with special needs (GPUs, DaemonSets with host access, strict cost tuning) usually still choose standard mode.
Node autoscaling
EKS: Karpenter is the standard choice today. It chooses the instance type for each pending pod, mixes Spot and On-Demand, and consolidates half-empty nodes. In our experience it gives the best cost results of the three, but you must configure it well.
GKE: cluster autoscaler with node auto-provisioning. It works well and needs little configuration.
AKS: cluster autoscaler, and node auto-provisioning, which is based on Karpenter.
Upgrades
Kubernetes releases a new minor version about three times a year, so you will upgrade often. This is where the services differ most in day-to-day work.
GKE upgrades clusters automatically through release channels (Rapid, Regular, Stable, Extended). You control when with maintenance windows and exclusions. This is the least work.
AKS has auto-upgrade channels and planned maintenance windows.
EKS upgrades the control plane only when you start it. Managed node groups and Auto Mode make node upgrades easier, but you need a process, or the cluster drifts into extended support.
On any of the three: check for deprecated APIs before every upgrade (tools such as pluto or kubent ), upgrade staging first, and keep add-ons (ingress controller, CSI drivers, service mesh) on supported versions.
Identity for workloads
All three let pods use cloud permissions without long-lived keys, which is a security requirement for us:
EKS: EKS Pod Identity (simpler) or IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA).
GKE: Workload Identity Federation for GKE.
AKS: Microsoft Entra Workload ID.
If your pods still use access keys stored in Kubernetes Secrets, fix that first.
Networking
EKS gives every pod an IP address from your VPC by default (VPC CNI). This is simple and fast, but large clusters can run out of IP addresses in small subnets. Plan your subnets, and use prefix delegation or a secondary CIDR range.
GKE uses VPC-native clusters with alias IP ranges, and GKE Dataplane V2 (based on Cilium and eBPF) for network policy and visibility.
AKS offers Azure CNI Overlay, which saves VNet addresses, and Azure CNI powered by Cilium.
Running in Israel
All three providers have a cloud region in Israel: AWS il-central-1 , Google Cloud me-west1 and Azure Israel Central, all in the Tel Aviv area, and their managed Kubernetes service is available there. If you have data residency rules or need low latency for users in Israel, check that every other service you need is also available in that region. Some newer services reach these regions later than the large US and EU regions, and prices there are usually higher.
Our recommendation
Whatever you choose, the decisions that cost the most money later are made at the start: subnet sizes, how workloads get cloud permissions, how many clusters you run, and who owns upgrades.
Need help to choose or migrate?
We design, build and run Kubernetes platforms on all three clouds. See our Kubernetes , AWS , Google Cloud and Azure services, or contact us to talk about your setup.
Topics: Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Azure, EKS, GKE, AKS