Kubernetes Cloud Providers: Digital Ocean vs AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service

All major cloud service providers have Kubernetes support. However, it may not be entirely clear which cloud provider offers the best Kubernetes distribution for your current needs. Each one varies significantly in features and affordability. But using a managed cloud platform will give you all the power of cloud computing. Not only that, it will greatly reduce complexity and boilerplate code maintenance. 

In this article, we are going to discuss two different cloud providers for Kubernetes: Digital Ocean and AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service). We’ll break it down by pricing model, ease of use, and ease of management. With that being said, let’s take the pricing model DOKS (Digital Ocean Kubernetes Service) and EKS.

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Pricing Model

DOKS is the service provided by Digital Ocean to manage Kubernetes Clusters. One great part about DOKS is that the Control Plane is free. The Control Plane manages the worker nodes and all the pods in the cluster. DOKS is generally considered the least expensive of the two—an organization could start a small cluster for as a little as $10 a month. However, in all reality, expect to be paying more than that for a production environment. DOKS’ price is based on the amount of bandwidth the cluster consumes.

One thing to consider with Amazon EKS is that it works in conjunction with Amazon Web Services. So right off the bat, expect to be paying those costs as well—such as EC2 instances, S3 Buckets, etc. Also, Amazon charges around 10 cents per hour per active cluster. In the grand scheme of things, expect to pay at least $80 a month for Amazon EKS.

Ease of Use

One of the great things about using either DOKS or EKS is the User Interface that comes along with it. Using a GUI (Graphical User Interface) as opposed to a CLI makes the job of spinning up clusters much quicker. 

Spinning up clusters is easy in particular with EKS. Amazon provides vast amounts of in-depth documentation and videos to assist with everything you could possibly need. Expect both Amazon EKS and DOKS to take about 30 minutes to set up. 

DOKS has a great feature that lets you choose the machine type of the node (A.K.A cluster) you are creating. There are five different types, Basic, General Purpose, CPU-Optimized, Memory-Optimized, and Storage Optimized. DOKS also has an out-of-the-box autoscaler that easily gives you control over how big (or small) you would like your cluster to be.

Rest assured for those who like EKS — an autoscaling product exists here as well. It is called Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler. Like usual AWS has very handy tutorials to get you up and running. 

When all is said and done, it should be noted the setup time for EKS may cost a little more than DOKS, since EKS charges by time instead of bandwidth.

Ease of Management

As long as you don’t plan on a wide array of customizations, DOKS allows you to do everything from their up-to-date, streamlined GUI. Otherwise, there is a good chance you’ll have to open up a command line interface. The CLI for DOKS is called doctl. In general, all of these CLIs are fairly similar. They are just tailored for their particular environments. However, for the most part, a typical user should be able to accomplish most tasks from the GUI.

One great feature of DOKS is its one-click applications catalog. This library allows you to easily install a monitoring software, automation software, and a plethora of other customizations.

EKS on the other hand has a dashboard that is more nuanced and configurable. For example, logging can be configured very easily straight from the GUI as shown below:

Like DOKS, EKS has its own custom CLI called eksctl. Similar to DOKS one-click applications catalog, EKS allows for EKS add-ons, but it does not seem to be quite as out of the box.

If you are running an application with particularly low latency, AWS actually has an excellent feature for that called AWS Outposts. This allows you to manage your containerized applications on-premise with the same ease and functionality you would receive on the cloud. This is excellent for organizations that are transitioning between the two or are looking to cut costs.

Final Thoughts

DOKS and EKS are both excellent Kubernetes services with their own advantages and disadvantages. First and foremost, if you are already on a Digital Ocean infrastructure, then there is no compelling reason to use EKS; and the same goes for the other way around.

Amazon EKS will more than likely cost more money, but it has loads of services that can seamlessly integrate into your Kubernetes stacks, such as S3, AWS Lambda, SNS, and more.