EKS vs Scaleway Kubernetes Kapsule: Which to Choose?

Key points:

• Cost & Complexity: Scaleway Kubernetes Kapsule offers a free control plane and out-of-the-box autoscaling, making it ideal for teams prioritizing speed and budget.‍
• Granular Control vs. Abstraction: AWS EKS requires complex IAM setups and manual autoscaler configurations, but provides fine-grained access control and deep architectural customization.‍
• Global Scale: EKS dominates in global availability with 25 regions compared to Scaleway's 3, making it the default choice for highly distributed, fault-tolerant applications.

The container orchestration tool Kubernetes helps an increasing number of companies to automate, scale, and manage their containerized application deployments. According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, adoption of the platform increased from 78% in 2019 to 83% in 2020. Its popularity is due to the benefits it offers, like scaling resources when needed, reducing downtime, and managing your application on multiple servers.

However, manually setting up your Kubernetes infrastructure can be expensive and frustrating, especially if your team lacks deep DevOps experience. Cloud providers aim to solve that problem by providing managed Kubernetes as a service. This saves you the trouble of handling your own control plane administration, cluster setup, scaling, monitoring, and provisioning of worker nodes.

This article will compare two managed Kubernetes services, AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Scaleway Kubernetes Kapsule, so you can decide which architecture fits your business needs.

AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service

Elastic Kubernetes Service is provided by AWS to manage and scale your Kubernetes cluster. With EKS, you can easily integrate other AWS services into your cluster, such as AWS Load Balancing, Identity and Access Management (IAM), and Elastic Block Storage. EKS is designed to host web applications requiring high availability, zero downtime, and strong security. You can also use EKS to deploy AWS Deep Learning Containers for custom machine learning environments.

Here are the core features EKS offers:

• Managed Control Plane: The Kubernetes control plane manages worker nodes and controls cluster functions like scheduling Pods and storing state. Because the control plane is complex, EKS manages it for you.
• Hybrid Deployments: Organizations with strict data sensitivity requirements can host clusters on a private cloud or local servers using AWS Outposts or Amazon EKS Anywhere.
• Logging and Metrics: AWS CloudTrail integrates with the cluster to provide a history of operations, while Amazon CloudWatch allows you to analyze and debug control plane logs.
• Managed Cluster Updates: Upgrading a self-managed cluster requires detailed planning to ensure high availability. EKS simplifies this process by managing the updates for you.
• Improved Security: EKS integrates Kubernetes role-based access control (RBAC) with AWS IAM to provide fine-grained access control to your nodes. IAM also controls access to integrated external services like databases or Secrets Manager.

Scaleway Kubernetes Kapsule

Kubernetes Kapsule, released in 2020 by Scaleway Elements, allows you to spin up and scale a cluster in minutes. It integrates easily with other Scaleway features such as virtual node instances, block storage, load balancing, and container registries. Kapsule can host high-performing applications, autoscaling up to 500 nodes, without requiring deep DevOps expertise.

Here are the core features Kubernetes Kapsule offers:

• Free Managed Control Plane: Scaleway Kubernetes Kapsule’s fully managed control plane is entirely free to use.
• Built-In Dashboard: Scaleway provides a web interface for monitoring cluster activities, resource utilization, and health.
• High Availability: Scaleway ensures control plane components are duplicated. If an issue occurs, you can seamlessly switch to a backup control plane.
• Pre-configured Ingress Controllers: Scaleway provides multiple ingress options during setup and automatically integrates them, saving you installation overhead (though you can still install your own).
• Auto-healing and Autoscaling: Kapsule performs periodic health checks on worker nodes. If a node doesn’t respond for 15 minutes, it is automatically replaced. The platform also scales your node pools up and down automatically as workloads change.

Which Should You Choose?

If you are trying to decide which managed service fits your architecture, you have to weigh raw performance against operational simplicity. EKS gives you limitless global scale at the cost of massive configuration overhead. Scaleway gives you speed and budget-friendly simplicity, but sacrifices granular control.

However, the most efficient engineering teams don't settle for either extreme, they deploy an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) on top of their cloud provider to get the best of both worlds.

Before diving into the technical specifics of pricing and architecture, here is a high-level breakdown of how raw EKS and Scaleway Kapsule compare, and how adding Qovery changes the operational equation entirely:

Cost of the Control Plane

Scaleway Kubernetes Kapsule doesn’t charge for its control plane. EKS charges $0.10 per hour for its control plane, which equates to roughly $73 per month.

While this cost may be negligible for high-performance enterprise applications, smaller-scale deployments may benefit from Scaleway's pricing model. Keep in mind that both platforms will still charge for underlying resources like worker node VMs, block storage, and load balancers.

Cluster Creation & Configuration

Creating a cluster on Scaleway is faster than EKS because there are fewer parameters to configure. For example, EKS requires you to configure complex IAM roles to allow the control plane to manage AWS resources on your behalf—a step that Scaleway completely abstracts away.

Creating a Cluster

Creating your Kubernetes cluster on Scaleway Kubernetes Kapsule is faster than EKS because there are fewer things to configure.

For instance, when creating your cluster in EKS you must configure IAM roles that will allow the control plane to manage AWS resources on your behalf. You don’t have to set this up in Kubernetes Kapsule.

Community Support and Resources

Due to the popularity of AWS, EKS has more resources and community support available.

If you have problems in your cluster or need help managing it, you’ll be better able to get assistance and answers than with Kubernetes Kapsule. However, Scaleway Kubernetes Kapsule offers 24/7 customer support.

Both services offer detailed documentation on their websites, which should be enough to create a cluster on either service.

Granular Control vs. Simplicity

The simplicity of Scaleway Kapsule means many configurations are abstracted, giving you less underlying control. EKS provides granular control, allowing you to create precise access control policies, enable SSH access to worker nodes, and deeply configure your cluster autoscaler.

Availability Zones and Regions

AWS dominates in physical footprint with 25 geographical regions and 80 availability zones. Scaleway operates in 3 regions with more than 4 availability zones. EKS offers vastly superior low-latency network connectivity and fault tolerance for global applications.

Autoscaling and Version Upgrades

• Autoscaling: Scaleway provides an autoscaling option during cluster creation that is configured automatically. In EKS, you must manually configure the Autoscaler functionality.
• Version Support: Both support at least the latest three versions of Kubernetes. However, Scaleway allows you to automate upgrades based on a timeframe, handling the process automatically once a version is specified. EKS requires a manual series of procedures to update cluster versions.

Conclusion

Managed Kubernetes services remove the massive overhead associated with self-hosted clusters. If you have a small team prioritizing speed and budget, Scaleway Kubernetes Kapsule is highly suitable due to its free control plane and abstracted configuration. If your organization requires fine-grained architectural control, global availability, and deep IAM security, EKS is the clear choice.

Whichever service you choose, there are additional tools available to easily deploy your applications. Qovery enables you to deploy to your AWS or Scaleway account within fifteen minutes with fewer configurations required, allowing you to focus on your application.

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