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Hardened Amazon AMI with kubectl for EKS

Kalimorph | 1.24.07072025

Linux/Unix, Amazon Linux 4.14.133-113.112.amzn2.x86_64 - 64-bit Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

Reviews from AWS customer

27 AWS reviews

External reviews

4 reviews
from

External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.


    Vipin Vikraman

The integration and stability are clear and reliable

  • November 07, 2024
  • Review from a verified AWS customer

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use case is related to our ecommerce solution, which is very high in terms of data in the database and products. It has one hundred thousand first line items. We developed a system connected with AWS services to translate search keywords into different languages and improve search results accuracy on our ecommerce site.

How has it helped my organization?

The scalability has really helped us a lot in enhancing the customer experience and ensuring quick results. The ROI is really good, especially when compared with other services on-premises.

What is most valuable?

Amazon EKS provides good support. The integration and stability are clear and reliable. The scalability is excellent, allowing us to efficiently handle customer experiences and improve operational efficiency.

What needs improvement?

Sometimes, we face minor connectivity issues. However, it depends on the applications we are using. Improvement might be needed based on different use cases.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using it since 2015.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability of Amazon EKS is clear and reliable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Amazon EKS's scalability is clear and has improved our operational efficiency a lot.

How are customer service and support?

The customer service and support are good, and we have a paid subscription that provides priority support.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was handled by third parties. It involved some complexities, and appropriate inputs were necessary.

What about the implementation team?

We worked with a third-party team for implementation, including many developers.

What was our ROI?

We did several ROIs, which showed positive results. It's particularly beneficial compared to investing in hardware.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The licensing cost is acceptable.

What other advice do I have?

Before implementing, ensure thorough research and ROI analysis. The implementation should be handled by experienced personnel.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud


    reviewer2543025

Simplify and speed up cluster management and handles scaling well

  • September 12, 2024
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

We use EKS in our company to run containerized applications. I work in the container ecosystem team, and we manage EKS clusters for our developer teams so they don't have to. We provide them with the necessary tools to run on top of the cluster.

EKS helps us simplify and speed up cluster management. We don't have to take care of cluster updates; we just initiate the update, and AWS handles it. The same goes for some of the AWS-managed add-ons.

How has it helped my organization?

The biggest improvement is that we now have more time. When we shifted the responsibility of cluster management and updates to AWS, we had more time to develop solutions that make life easier for the developers. 

Application deployment is more automatic. They don't have to issue cluster commands; they can simply do a commit into our internal GitHub Enterprise, and our tooling will deploy or update the application on the cluster. That's probably the biggest benefit because we had time to develop such solutions.

What is most valuable?

From my personal perspective, I think it's good that we can use AWS CLI to manage the cluster, and that way, we can automate the work via scripts. Of course, the way that we just issue a command and AWS handles the work, like with cluster updates, is also valuable. That's probably one of the reasons why we use it.

What needs improvement?

Sometimes I have trouble because, in our corporate network, there are various networks, etcetera. It's difficult to connect to some of the clusters, and it's easier to go through the UI when troubleshooting something. At some points, the UI seems limited to me with the functions it provides. 

You can get information like what kind of port is running on the cluster, but I haven't really explored the UI so far, so it's difficult for me to see the logs, for example. Or sometimes, you are only limited to the basic Kubernetes things. 

We have certain customizations installed in the cluster, and for that, you really have to use kubectl from the command line. You are not able to use the EKS UI to list certain custom resources. So maybe there can be some kind of improvement, but maybe it's just me that I haven't really explored the UI that much.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using it since February. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I don't really remember any issue with EKS, the product from AWS as is. There can be some issues when there is a bigger outage on the AWS side; it's either some kind of network outage when we cannot reach AWS itself or something similar, but I wouldn't blame EKS for it.

When we had problems with the cluster itself, I think it was more about some issue that either we as a team introduced by human error, from some configuration mistake, or our customers sometimes made mistakes. And maybe there are issues when the application running on top of EKS somehow gets into some loop or something and then doesn't work correctly, but I wouldn't really attribute that to EKS.

Because I've been in the team for a short amount of time, I don't really remember any big issue that was caused by EKS itself in the past six months at least.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is scalable. We use the cluster autoscaler tool that spins up a new node when we need more, and that works nicely. So I think from the scalability point of view, it's okay. 

In the last six months, I don't really see any issue with scalability. We run around one hundred clusters. Some of them are quite small, really just the basics where we are running free master nodes in the free availability zones, just to make things according to best practices. So, really a minimal cluster. 

And there are also some really big clusters with over a hundred worker nodes. Overall, I think it's quite big. And with EKS, we are able to manage it quite well.

How are customer service and support?

I have some experience with AWS support, and it was good. We were trying to solve something with one of the add-ons, and I think we solved it within a couple of days. We even had a call with one of the support engineers. So I think it worked out well. 

The issue was regarding one of the AWS-managed add-ons. I remember that we clearly had some kind of misunderstanding between us and technical support, and it seemed like either we were not able to explain it correctly or the guy wasn't able to understand us. But I remember that somehow we solved that issue. So at the end, it was okay.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

How was the initial setup?

The deployment process of EKS was done before I joined the team.

For me, EKS UI is nice, and it was quite easy for me to get familiar with. I find the AWS CLI quite nice to use as well. I've been working in IT for some time now, so I have some level of experience. I guess these things come sort of naturally to me now, such as how to use the tools that are provided by companies. It's usually no issue for me.

From the maintenance point of view, I don't know much about how things are backed up, etcetera. I think that is exactly why we use EKS because we don't really have to take care of cluster backups. We can simply issue a command, and the cluster will update. If we were to do cluster updates manually, it would be more work. We would have to update the worker nodes and then update the master node one by one. AWS now handles all of this. So I think from the maintenance point of view, it's great, and that's why we use it because it's now much more simple and faster for us.

What was our ROI?

We still see the benefits of using this solution because we are using it. And we actually plan to transfer all our workloads to EKS if things were ideal. But for some legal reasons, we still have to manage some on-premise clusters, but I think the benefits are there.

What other advice do I have?

If you have the money, I would recommend the EKS product to other users who are looking into implementing it. It's a good tool. It really takes some of the management burden off your back.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises


    Hunaid Vekariya

Handles multiple tasks, seamless integration, scalability is good and serverless deployments

  • September 12, 2024
  • Review from a verified AWS customer

What is our primary use case?

For EKS, we deployed a Django application. The application built the whole image and stored it in ECR (Elastic Container Registry). We stored the code repository in GitHub, but the image was in ECR. We also had another repository for the Kubernetes manifest files. So we were deploying it in a different image, and the code was in a different image. We had a whole pipeline for deployment, from CodePipeline to ECR, and then from ECR to Kubernetes.

I work with different AWS solutions, such as Elastic Beanstalk, AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, and VPC. I use services like EC2, S3, and VPC every day, so I'm not including those. I've also used API Gateway, and currently, I also use AWS Bedrock.

What is most valuable?

The good thing was the integration of services. The only thing we had to think about was how we were pushing the code to GitHub or Bitbucket. After that, everything was taken care of by AWS. 

Everything was connected: the code and the real-time deployment. Testing was done within the same pipeline using CodeBuild. CodeBuild was handling multiple tasks: testing the code, deploying it to ECR, and then running it on AWS Fargate for development or testing. Once it was working fine, we had an approval stage. After approval, we deployed it to EKS using the command line from the same AWS CodeBuild process.

The scalability of EKS is good. We've compared it with multiple platforms, and we've also worked with GCP. There are more good options available in GCP compared to EKS.

But the good thing about EKS is that we can use it for serverless deployments using Fargate. It gives you two options: deploy on EC2 or deploy on Fargate. EC2 runs 24/7 and costs you money, but Fargate only runs when you need it. So EKS was really helpful for saving costs with that serverless capability.

What needs improvement?

I would like to see a warm-up time for AWS Fargate, similar to what GCP Cloud Run has. This would improve internal security. I would also really love to see lower costs compared to other cloud vendors. AWS can get quite expensive.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been working with EKS on and off for the last two years. Some of the projects were my own, and some were development projects.

How are customer service and support?

They have good documentation and lots of blogs on Amazon AWS, so we mostly follow those. We haven't reached out to technical support directly. We had a plan for technical support, but it took them more time to fully help us. 

Sometimes the issue is on our code side and not on AWS's side. Getting the customer service and support involved in our whole process takes a long time. It's better to research for a few hours and fix it yourself rather than waiting for a week or so.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

GKE gives you really good monitoring and logging, where you can see every bit of information flowing in your environment. AWS provides the same thing with CloudWatch, but it's much easier in GKE to see what's exactly going on. So monitoring and the transparency of what's happening would be one thing AWS needs to improve.

The pros of EKS are that it makes deployment really easy. You just need to package your image in ECR, and then everything goes very smoothly. You don't have to worry about running or managing Kubernetes. It gives you a managed control plane, and they replicate the control plane over different regions. So there's very little chance that it will go down. Reliability is really high with AWS.

How was the initial setup?

When we started we had an issue with rollbacks. We had problems because we had to specify certain AWS parameters in order to deploy it properly. We consulted the documentation and resolved it that way.

We did some testing, and that took about one month with it. Then we started with a very small infrastructure on EKS, migrating some of our traditional websites to EKS directly. So, the initial setup took about two months. 

But we didn't use it for microservices; we only used it for two services: one was our platform service, and the other was Redis.

What about the implementation team?

In my case, I handled the deployment part. I had a manager, so I just took his approval and gave him the deployment design. He was overseeing everything, but I was doing almost all the AWS work. The developers were really helpful in making the code run correctly with the image versioning.

Users have to maintain things. For example, we faced an issue where we had a lot of requests coming in, and we weren't ready with enough resources at the time. We had to manually increase the Kubernetes nodes. That was an issue with horizontal scaling. It was our mistake because we didn't automate it.

What was our ROI?

We shifted from EKS to GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine). We are saving around 20% with that change.

What other advice do I have?

I already have recommended it to many people. If you're using AWS for other services, definitely go with EKS because it doesn't make sense to move to another cloud vendor if you're already using everything in AWS. The integration is really good. You get AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) on top of it, load balancer, GuardDuty, and Inspector. So security-wise, it's really nice to have EKS surrounded by those security tools.

My advice would be to try to go with AWS Fargate initially. Try to understand how ECR (Elastic Container Registry) works because it also costs you money, so make sure your image isn't too big. And if you can, go with AWS CodeCommit, it makes things very fast. And for EKS, they can use Fargate with EKS as a service. So, users don't have to worry about scalability and reliability. It's totally managed from the user's end.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. 


    Mustafa Husny

Provides good performance and used for testing and learning purposes

  • August 08, 2024
  • Review from a verified AWS customer

What is our primary use case?

I used Amazon EKS for my personal learning purposes. I used the solution to learn how to initiate and upgrade the Kubernetes cluster for testing in my own lab.

What is most valuable?

Amazon EKS is a good tool for my testing and learning purposes. The solution's performance is good. It is a good solution for my learning and my labs.

What needs improvement?

The solution's graphical interface is not the best. It could be better in terms of enabling some integrations or managing the configuration.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Amazon EKS for one or two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I rate the solution’s stability ten out of ten.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Amazon EKS is good when it comes to scaling the cluster, adding, removing, or upgrading the nodes. Upgrading the machine's resources is easy.

How are customer service and support?

Amazon EKS has a big community, and support is really good.

How was the initial setup?

The solution's initial setup was easy.

What was our ROI?

If the deployment fails, you're still up and running. Scaling up or down can be done with zero downtime.

What other advice do I have?

Some of the Kubernetes clusters were on Amazon, GCP, and Azure. I used most of them on-premises. I installed the Kubernetes cluster in my own environment.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.


    reviewer1805982

Offers horizontal and vertical scaling and useful for cloud-native applications

  • May 13, 2024
  • Review from a verified AWS customer

What is our primary use case?

The use case for Amazon EKS is for a payment gateway corporation whose applications run on microservices. Their software team develops cloud-native applications. They use Amazon's public cloud for these applications but find it expensive. They want a less expensive solution for their customers.

We suggest using Amazon EKS open-source solutions. By using these solutions on-premises, they don't have to pay Amazon. 

What is most valuable?

Amazon EKS is a useful solution for modern, cloud-native applications. It offers both horizontal and vertical scaling, which is a big advantage. The tool can also help manage costs while maintaining high availability.

Integrating Amazon EKS with other AWS services is easy if you know how to connect your applications and understand programming. It depends on how your application uses modern programming languages.

What needs improvement?

The main thing to improve with Amazon EKS is the price. However, these services can be very expensive. For example, in countries like Turkey, the cost is too high. That's why we offer our cloud solutions locally. We developed hybrid solutions, but their prices are still very high.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I rate the tool's stability a nine out of ten. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution is very scalable. We have two customers for Amazon EKS. 

How are customer service and support?

We don't use support. Our customers use it. 

How was the initial setup?

The tool's deployment is easy. The deployment process is very simple. First, create an account. It's very organic. After that, choose the service that will be used for the project and create new services. Provide your credentials to connect to the environment. If you want to use a private link, you'll need to use a private connection.

What other advice do I have?

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten. If you want to start quickly and have time constraints, you can use Amazon solutions because no time or effort is needed to prepare your environment for the market, and no hardware or infrastructure requirements are required. 

It can affect team productivity with a few customers. Productivity depends on the customers' knowledge. If their developers or software team are familiar with using hyperscale issues, it is very productive to use it.

If you need off-site backup solutions, object storage, or to check your data's secondary version for disaster recovery, you can use AWS Backup or Amazon EKS service, like S3 buckets. It's very useful.


    Jigneshkumar Gadhavi

Supports multiple tools and has a straightforward setup process

  • March 29, 2024
  • Review from a verified AWS customer

What is our primary use case?

We use Amazon EKS to manage containerization within our microservices environment.

What is most valuable?

The product's most valuable features are scalability, observability, and performance.

What needs improvement?

They could add logging features. At present, we use external tools to increase and decrease the number of instances.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using Amazon EKS for three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is a stable service. We never encountered system downtime.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

In organizational environments, especially when utilizing the console, EKS is the primary choice. Out of ten clients, approximately eight opt for EKS due to its scalability and robust features.

How are customer service and support?

We contacted AWS support for EKS when we encountered difficulties connecting to private subnets. The support team guided us through the necessary steps to address these issues.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Scalability and security considerations drove the decision to migrate to EKS from another product.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was straightforward, especially when Terraform was utilized to generate the setup. We must make minor adjustments, such as changing the name and configuring VPN settings. Overall, it's a relatively easy task for me.

What was our ROI?

The platform is worth the investment.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The product pricing depends on the specific requirements. For instance, clients between $3000-$4000 per month might find the pricing reasonable, with clusters priced around $70 to $80 plus additional costs. However, the actual pricing can vary based on the number of services utilized.

What other advice do I have?

With numerous tools and plugins available for EKS like Graphite and Prometheus, users can effectively manage logs and monitor performance.

For beginners, it's essential to grasp the fundamentals of Docker and containerization and understand how containers operate. Once these basics are clear, the next step is to familiarize oneself with Kubernetes and container orchestration concepts.

I rate it a nine out of ten.

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)


    RajeshKumar22

A competitively priced product with an easy setup phase in place

  • February 29, 2024
  • Review from a verified AWS customer

What is our primary use case?

I use the solution for its microservices. I used the product in some of my personal projects for deploying applications. From an organizational standpoint, the product is useful for its microservices.

What needs improvement?

When it comes to Amazon EKS, there are IAM permissions and RBAC. When you create an IAM user, you give the privileges on the cluster level, but there won't be anything inside the clusters. In the clusters and their respective files, you will have to map the IAM user created with the help of AWS. The documentation part of the product is an area of concern that needs to be made easier from an improvement perspective.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have experience with the tool for the past six to eight months. For some of my personal projects, I have been using the product for a year and a half. I am a customer of the product.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

How was the initial setup?

The product's initial setup phase is easy since it is only based on a one-line command to help you set up an EKS cluster.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The product is available at such a huge scale in the market since the resources that are offered under the tool are competitively priced and available at a much cheaper rate compared to other solutions.

What other advice do I have?

One of the aspects of Kubecost and Amazon EKS is that you don't have to manage the master node. The scalability and connectivity between API servers and its resources, including its scheduler and controller, are all taken care of by AWS. Not being easily able to log in to your master node makes things secure.

I found the cluster autoscaler of AWS to be very helpful. It is easier for users since the cluster autoscaler takes care of the nodes, making everything easy for me. With the cluster autoscaler, all the resources are presented to me, so I need not consider any integrations from the outside environment. The aforementioned reasons made it easy for me to set up the software and scale down the resources easily.

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. Kubernetes is a product from Google, which offers good compatibility. Kubernetes and its compatibility with Amazon is decent enough for users, in my opinion.

I rate the overall tool a ten out of ten.


    Nikhil Sehgal

Can be used to implement and create clusters, but assigning permissions to users is difficult

  • January 11, 2024
  • Review from a verified AWS customer

What is most valuable?

Amazon EKS can be used to implement and create clusters. It is also used to deploy and secure the already configured applications. EKS is a cloud-based container management service that integrates with Kubernetes to deploy applications. It automatically manages and scales clusters of infrastructure resources on AWS with Kubernetes.

EKS eliminates the need to install, operate, or maintain a Kubernetes control plane on AWS. Amazon handles everything. We just need to know how we can make it more secure, and we can use it to deploy your applications. It scales automatically, making it one of the best services.

What needs improvement?

Assigning roles and responsibilities to interact with a created cluster as a user over a command prompt is cumbersome on AWS. Initially, we create a user to interact with a cluster. Since everyone can't use the cluster, we need to assign some permissions to that specific user. It is very cumbersome to assign permissions to users to interact with a cluster. We always get errors, and it takes many days to resolve that permission issue before the user can start interacting with the cluster.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Amazon EKS for eight years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Amazon EKS is a stable solution.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Amazon EKS is a scalable solution.

How are customer service and support?

The solution’s technical support is good.

How was the initial setup?

The solution’s initial setup is easy, but assigning permissions to users is difficult.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Amazon EKS is not a cheap solution.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Google Cloud Platform has a service similar to EKS called GKE. It's very easy to implement permissions in GKE as compared to EKS.

What other advice do I have?

Overall, I rate Amazon EKS a seven out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)


    reviewer2304354

Recommended cloud solution with easy setup

  • November 23, 2023
  • Review from a verified AWS customer

What is most valuable?

The solution is easy-to-set up. It is quick, and the main management is conveniently maintained in AWS, eliminating concerns.

What needs improvement?

I'd like improved traffic handling and additional application details within the system.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been working with the solution for three years now.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Amazon EKS is stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution is scalable.

How was the initial setup?

The solution is straightforward to set up.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We are also working with VMware Tanzu.

What other advice do I have?

I would recommend the solution. Overall, I rate it a nine out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)


    Phat Chau

Stable product with valuable monitoring features

  • November 21, 2023
  • Review from a verified AWS customer

What is our primary use case?

We use Amazon EKS as an APM tool for the environment while migrating the monolithic architecture to microservices architecture. It helps us to test product functionality in a particular environment.

What is most valuable?

We don’t have to manage a bunch of infrastructure. Additionally, enabling auto-scaling for both outgoing and node work helps us optimize the cost. It has valuable monitoring and insights features as well.

What needs improvement?

The product’s pricing needs improvement.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using Amazon EKS for more than three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is a stable product.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have 200 Amazon EKS users in our organization. It is a scalable product.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup process takes a few minutes to complete. It requires a team of seven executives to work on the deployment.

What was our ROI?

The product generates a return on investment with the help of OpEx and CaPEx licensing models.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Amazon EKS is expensive.

What other advice do I have?

I rate Amazon EKS a nine out of ten.

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)