# Amazon EKS 28 Hacker News commenters recommended Amazon EKS and 13 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Managed Kubernetes on AWS that runs the control plane, so people can deploy containers with little upkeep. Common caveat: costs add up at scale and it still needs looking after. ## Why people recommend it - Little ongoing maintenance needed (4 comments): "If you go cloud managed (EKS etc), there isn't really much to take care of." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48032937)) "you set it up once and then it's mostly done, including security, etc." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843398)) "the day-to-day operations are not that heavy" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46366183)) - Turnkey managed Kubernetes setup (4 comments): "EKS is literally one click of a button away and you dont need to handroll this." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48665755)) "Using a cloud provider ( eks / aks / gke ) is trivial and "problem" free." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48577763)) "AWS EKS, GCP GKE, and other competitors have made k8s setup turnkey" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48552320)) - Reliable and straightforward to run (4 comments): "Managed k8s services like EKS have been super reliable the last few years." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46765671)) "Never have issues with stable services like S3, ECS, EKS, or RDS." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46841359)) "EKS, which by the way has been working very good for me" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47873753)) - Runs most apps and third-party software (2 comments): "pretty much any normal service or app you need to run can be deployed on that" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45984134)) "it's actually been really good for installing 3rd party software so far" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48549522)) ## What people warn about - Needs ongoing babysitting and management (4 comments): "EKS is more complex, and needs a bit more looking after." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49753119)) "The reason was the "management" overhead of babysitting the cluster" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752833)) "AWS makes you do things like manage node OS and addon versions" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48838534)) - Costs add up at scale (3 comments): "At 20000 nodes you are looking at $340 million/year, not including egress fees or any other AWS service charges" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48753017)) "for ~$70/month, you get the cluster API, not the EC2 compute required for worker nodes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997398)) "spinning up multiple eks clusters is ridiculously expensive" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49195635)) - Noisy cluster health warnings (2 comments): "EKS has all sorts of these warning flags it pops up on cluster health" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45980638)) "EKS warnings are useful, I've grown a habit to ignore them completely" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45984560)) - Networking limits for IPv6 and overlays (2 comments): "There's no such thing as an IPv6-only EKS cluster, every subnet you give EKS still needs an IPv4 CIDR" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49799072)) "Even on AWS EKS, you will run into bullshit with their network overlay." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48547811)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Google Kubernetes Engine](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gke.md): 6 recommend - [Google Kubernetes Engine](https://hackerapproved.com/p/google-kubernetes-engine.md): 6 recommend - [DigitalOcean Kubernetes](https://hackerapproved.com/p/digitalocean-kubernetes.md): 6 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://aws.amazon.com/eks/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Amazon EKS", https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-eks/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).