EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) is AWS's managed Kubernetes service. It runs Kubernetes clusters on AWS without you having to set up or manage the Kubernetes control plane.
Use EKS over ECS when: your company already uses Kubernetes and wants to migrate to AWS without relearning tooling.
| EKS Term | ECS Equivalent | What It Is |
|---|---|---|
| Pod | Task | Smallest unit — one or more containers running together |
| Node | EC2 Instance | The server that runs your pods |
| Node Group | EC2 Launch Type | A group of EC2 instances managed by an ASG |
| Fargate Profile | Fargate Launch Type | Serverless — no nodes at all |
AWS Cloud (VPC)
|
|-- AZ 1 (Public subnet: ELB, NGW | Private subnet: EKS Node --> Pods)
|-- AZ 2 (Public subnet: ELB, NGW | Private subnet: EKS Node --> Pods)
|-- AZ 3 (Public subnet: ELB, NGW | Private subnet: EKS Node --> Pods)
|
Auto Scaling Group
(manages adding/removing nodes)
| Managed Node Groups | Self-Managed Nodes | Fargate | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who manages EC2 | AWS | You | No EC2 at all |
| Control | Medium | Full | None needed |
| Maintenance | Low | High | Zero |
| Spot instances | Yes | Yes | No |
To attach storage to EKS pods, you define a StorageClass manifest. EKS uses a CSI (Container Storage Interface) driver to connect.
| Storage | Use Case |
|---|---|
| Amazon EBS | Block storage, one pod at a time |
| Amazon EFS | Shared file storage, works with Fargate too |
| Amazon FSx for Lustre | High performance computing |
| Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP | Enterprise NAS workloads |