[tthayer]

The controlplane costs ~$45USD/year to run but so far my experience with it has been super positive. They support new releases quickly and if you're using managed node groups you can do blue/green version upgrades.

The main tradeoff for using EKS is the built-in CNI is limited by the number of virtual IPs you can assign to a given node type's network adapters. If you are running a bunch of small workloads you end up with very under-utilized compute and if you're using autoscaling that results in a lot of churn. We replaced it with weave-cni which has it's own set of headaches in regards to pod access to the control plane but it does allow us to run a basically unlimited number of small workloads on somewhat beefy instances. We set it up using spot pricing and the costs have been very low.

[mikepurvis]

Okay, thanks! My primary interest is for spot instance CI workers, so yeah, the deployment side is a non-issue and having a sane story for auto-scaling many small short-term workloads is exactly my scenario.