Key points

• EKS reduces control-plane operations but customers still design clusters, workloads, networking, security, and capacity.
• Use Fargate for eligible serverless pod capacity or EC2 when node-level control and specialized capacity matter.
• Kubernetes portability and existing operational skill can justify EKS; containers alone do not.

Best-known use cases

• Run Kubernetes applications with managed control planes.
• Preserve Kubernetes tooling or ecosystem requirements during migration.

What candidates often confuse it with

• EKS supplies Kubernetes compatibility; ECS supplies AWS-native container orchestration with less Kubernetes overhead.
• EKS manages the control plane; EKS Anywhere is customer-managed Kubernetes outside AWS.

Key takeaway

Choose EKS only when Kubernetes is a real requirement that outweighs its operational complexity.

Related services

• AWS Fargate
• Amazon ECR
• Amazon ECS

Relevant exam tasks

• D2.1
• D3.2

Learn more

• Amazon EKS