EKS gives you a Kubernetes control plane on AWS. Stakater Cloud gives you managed OpenShift plus the entire platform layer — GitOps, CI/CD, secrets, observability, multi-tenancy — pre-wired and hosted in the EU.
EKS is Amazon's managed Kubernetes service. It provisions and patches your Kubernetes control plane on AWS — but GitOps, CI/CD, secrets management, observability, multi-tenancy, and security hardening remain your team's responsibility.
EKS gives you raw Kubernetes. Going from EKS to a production-grade platform takes 6–18 months of engineering. Stakater Cloud ships ArgoCD, Tekton, OpenBao, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, multi-tenancy, and more — production-ready on day one.
OpenShift ships with stronger security defaults, a developer console, integrated image registry, and enterprise support from Red Hat. EKS gives you plain upstream Kubernetes — every enterprise feature is an add-on your team must wire.
EKS ties your data to AWS and your bill to AWS pricing. Stakater Cloud is operated by a Swedish company, with default EU deployment in Amsterdam and GDPR/DORA/NIS2 aligned operations under one flat monthly fee.
The real alternative isn't switching cloud providers — it's spending 12–18 months building this yourself with an internal platform team.
A real migration plan, run alongside your team. No two-week sales pitch dressed up as discovery.
We scope your existing EKS setup — clusters, workloads, data volumes, integrations, compliance posture. Honest assessment of what moves cleanly and what needs care.
Your dedicated OpenShift cluster is provisioned in under 15 minutes, EU-hosted, with the full platform layer pre-wired — GitOps, CI/CD, observability, secrets, multi-tenancy.
Stakater SRE runs the migration alongside your team. Containerised workloads move first; data, integrations, and DNS cutover are scheduled around your risk tolerance.
No. EKS is managed Kubernetes on AWS. OpenShift is an enterprise application platform built on Kubernetes — security hardening, developer console, integrated image registry, stricter RBAC defaults, enterprise support.
A GitOps tool (ArgoCD), CI/CD (Tekton), secrets management (OpenBao), full observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki), multi-tenancy, network policies, image scanning (RHACS), backup (Velero), certificate management. Stakater Cloud includes all of this managed.
EKS runs on AWS — a US company subject to the US CLOUD Act. For European regulated industries, this creates data sovereignty concerns. Stakater Cloud provides default EU deployment, Swedish operation, and ISO 27001:2022 certification.
EKS cluster creation takes minutes. Building a production-grade platform on top realistically takes 3–9 months. Stakater Cloud is production-ready in under 15 minutes.
In practice, yes — typically 2–4 platform engineers. Stakater Cloud is your platform team, included.
Stakater Cloud Managed OpenShift carries a 99.9% uptime SLA on the cluster control plane, with multi-AZ high availability available. EKS publishes a 99.95% control-plane SLA but every layer above the Kubernetes API — applications, observability, ingress, backup — is your team's SLA to define and operate.
Yes — ISO 27001:2022 (information security) and ISO 9001:2015 (quality management), independently audited annually. EKS itself is governed by AWS's certifications, but those cover the underlying infrastructure, not the application platform your team has to build on top.
Default deployment is Amsterdam, Netherlands, for EU data residency. Additional regions can be supported on request. EKS runs in any AWS region you choose, but all data sits within AWS — a US company.
Book a 30-minute call. We'll show you exactly how Stakater Cloud stacks up against EKS for your specific workload — no sales pitch, just an honest conversation.