EC2 vs EKS | Comparing a pile of bricks to a full-service construction crew.

• EC2 (the bricks): You get sturdy, versatile building blocks—raw virtual machines—ready for you to shape any way you want. You handle the blueprints, framing, plumbing, and inspections yourself.
• EKS (the construction crew): You still need bricks, but the crew arrives with cranes, scaffolding, and a project manager. They coordinate where every wall goes, keep the job site safe, and make sure the finished structure can scale from a garden shed to a skyscraper.

1. EC2 vs EKS – What EC2 Gives You (and What It Doesn’t)

EC2 = a virtual machine in the cloud.
You choose an AMI, size, and network, then handle everything else:

If you want containers on EC2, you roll your own Kubernetes (or another orchestrator) inside those VMs.

2. EC2 vs EKS – Why Containers Changed the Game

Containers wrap an app and its libraries into one image. That image runs the same on a laptop, test cluster, or production.
A minimal Go API server, for example:

dockerfile

Copy

# Dockerfile FROM golang:1.22-alpine AS build WORKDIR /src COPY . . RUN go build -o api .  FROM scratch COPY --from=build /src/api /api ENTRYPOINT ["/api"]

Key takeaways:

1. Repeatable builds – the same layers every time.
2. Fast spin-up – no heavy guest OS.
3. Cloud-native networking – the image expects to live behind a service mesh or load balancer.

3. EC2 vs EKS – Enter EKS: Managed Kubernetes on AWS

EKS supplies the Kubernetes control plane (API server, etcd) as a service. You still run the data plane (worker nodes) in your account. Benefits:

• Upstream-compatible Kubernetes API
• Deep hooks into IAM, ALB/NLB, CloudWatch
• Choice of EC2 nodes or Fargate

Version policy – Each Kubernetes release is supported for 14 months, plus up to 12 months extended support (26 months total). AWS DocumentationAmazon Web Services, Inc.

4. Hands-On: Creating an EKS Cluster with eksctl

Prereqs: AWS CLI configured, kubectl, eksctl, and an IAM user with AdministratorAccess.

brew tap weaveworks/tap && brew install weaveworks/tap/eksctl

bash
eksctl create cluster \
  --name demo \
  --region us-west-2 \
  --nodes 2 \
  --node-type m5.large

kubectl get nodes

eksctl create addon --name metrics-server --cluster demo

yaml
# deploy.yaml
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: api
spec:
  replicas: 2
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: api
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: api
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: api
        image: ghcr.io/org/api:1.0.0
        ports:
        - containerPort: 8080
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: api
spec:
  type: LoadBalancer
  selector:
    app: api
  ports:
  - port: 80
    targetPort: 8080

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5. EC2 vs EKS – Where EKS Still Feels Heavy

6. EC2 vs EKS – How Kapstan Makes EKS Feel Like a PaaS

Kapstan builds on top of EKS so you keep AWS resilience, but removes the daily toil:

EC2 vs EKS – Final Thoughts and Next Step with Kapstan

If this EC2 vs EKS tour proved anything, it’s that Kubernetes can be both empowering and time-consuming. You get portability, autoscaling, and strong APIs—yet you also inherit version bumps, add-on drift, and cost puzzles. Kapstan keeps the strengths while trimming the chores. It spins up and patches the cluster, wires in add-ons, and gives you a clean UI and CLI to ship code without sifting through YAML or Terraform.

Curious whether Kapstan can lighten your load? Spin up a sandbox cluster free for two months. Kick the tires, deploy a service, watch your dashboards fill with logs and metrics—then decide if it’s the right fit.

Less cluster babysitting, more feature shipping. Give Kapstan a shot today.

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