We're starting a new project based on K8s. the production is planned in one year. What would be a better choice for the orchestration tool. ACS with K8s or should we target AKS even though it's in preview mode? Managed k8s on Azure is a final decision. This is a major project that would drive technology choices at enterprise level. Thanks
Neither.
AKS and EKS are both in preview and won’t be competitive with GKE for a long time. The important thing to realize with hosted Kubernetes isn’t that you get K8s itself but all of the addons and integrations and extra functionality you need. Because if the hosting provider doesn’t provide what you need you probably don’t have enough access/control to add it yourself. GKE is pretty much the choice in hosted K8s that makes any sense in the market right now for near term production. There are some smaller players in that market, but Google will eclipse them in both access to new functionality and stability.
Anyone investing in AKS or EKS right now has a long roadmap and cash to burn investing in a long term solution.
ACI is interesting but it’s use cases are probably too narrow to use it as your only deployment solution. It’s interesting as a quick to market solution for high-isolation applications, but that high isolation will also make it harder to use for development, more expensive for large deployments, and harder to integrate with other solutions.
[edit - sorry thought you said ACI, not ACS]
ACS might be a reasonable option if you can’t use GKE because you’re already invested in Azure. ACS isn’t really hosted K8s tho. So it’s not apples to apples. ACS is Microsoft’s non-committal investment into 3 different container platforms (Docker, K8s, DC/OS) before they doubled down on K8s. It’s effectively an install wizard. You get to manage the system yourself, with a few useful exceptions. On the plus side this means, you can modify it. On the down side you probably can’t modify the installer much. So managing multiple modified clusters is gonna be more of a hassle than if you used your own installer.
Compared to fully hosted K8s, ACS will be more work to operate and extend, but it’s also half way to self-managed, so the trade off is that you get more control and flexibility.
Azure has the beta option and the deprecated option. I’d still recommend neither, but it really depends how locked into Azure you are.