--- title: Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Reviews meta_title: 'Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 116 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.4 review_count: 116 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-08-09' parent_category: name: Containerization url: https://www.g2.com/categories/containerization --- # Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Reviews **Vendor:** Microsoft **Category:** [Container Management Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/container-management) **Average Rating:** 4.4/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 116 ## About Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a fully managed Kubernetes service that simplifies the deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications. By handling critical tasks such as health monitoring, maintenance, and scaling, AKS reduces the operational overhead associated with Kubernetes management. This allows developers to focus on building and deploying applications without the complexities of infrastructure management. Key Features and Functionality: - Managed Kubernetes Control Plane: Azure automatically creates and configures the Kubernetes control plane, handling tasks like monitoring, patching, and scaling, thereby reducing the need for in-depth Kubernetes expertise. - Scalability: AKS supports horizontal pod autoscaling and cluster autoscaling, enabling applications to scale seamlessly in response to demand fluctuations. - Integration with Azure Services: AKS integrates with Azure Active Directory for identity management, Azure Monitor for health and performance monitoring, and Azure DevOps for continuous integration and deployment pipelines. - Security and Compliance: Features such as role-based access control (RBAC), private clusters, and Azure Policy enforcement help ensure secure and compliant application deployments. - Support for Windows and Linux Containers: AKS allows the deployment of both Windows and Linux containers within the same cluster, facilitating the modernization of diverse applications. Primary Value and Problem Solved: AKS addresses the challenges of managing Kubernetes infrastructure by providing a fully managed service that automates complex tasks like cluster provisioning, scaling, and maintenance. This enables organizations to accelerate the development and deployment of cloud-native applications, integrate AI capabilities, and ensure high availability and performance without the need for extensive Kubernetes expertise. By offloading the operational complexities to Azure, AKS allows teams to focus on innovation and delivering value to their users. ## Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users find the **ease of use** of Azure Kubernetes Service highly beneficial for deploying and managing applications seamlessly. (13 reviews) - Users appreciate the **managed service and ease of use** in Azure Kubernetes Service, enhancing their cloud experience significantly. (6 reviews) - Users value the **scalability** of Azure Kubernetes Service, enabling quick and efficient infrastructure scaling for applications. (5 reviews) - Users benefit from the **time-saving automation** of Azure Kubernetes Service, enhancing productivity in project development. (3 reviews) - Users value the **seamless integration with Azure services** , enhancing application deployment and infrastructure scaling efficiently. (3 reviews) - Cloud Computing (3 reviews) - Cloud Storage (2 reviews) - Customer Support (2 reviews) - Data Security (2 reviews) - Users find that **AKS deployment is easy and manageable** , streamlining orchestration compared to other tools like EKS and GKE. (2 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find Azure Kubernetes Service **expensive** compared to competitors, facing challenges with the unclear pricing model and unexpected costs. (3 reviews) - Users find the **complexity of the pricing model** challenging, with unpredictable charges and frequent service changes. (2 reviews) - Users find the **cost issues** with Azure Kubernetes Service challenging due to its complex pricing and transaction-based charges. (2 reviews) - Users find the **learning curve challenging** for beginners, but support helps ease the initial setup process. (2 reviews) - Users report **bug issues** in Azure Kubernetes Service, especially with frequent changes complicating tracking and stability. (1 reviews) - Complexity Issues (1 reviews) - Complex Setup (1 reviews) - Cost Management (1 reviews) - Dependency Issues (1 reviews) - Downtime Issues (1 reviews) ## Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Reviews ### 1. Much faster than deploying in a VM **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Apparel & Fashion | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 12, 2016 **What do you like best about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** Integration with Docker. This makes the service usable for our developers working cross-platform. **What do you dislike about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** The application management portal could be better. Sometimes it's laggy or the status is out of date. Also, there are so many animations in the portal that it makes the web browser super sluggish. **Recommendations to others considering Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS):** Try out similar AWS offerings too, since the admin portals are somewhat different, and one of the two services may suit your needs better. **What problems is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) solving and how is that benefiting you?** We wanted to develop our Ruby on Rails services cross-platform. The container service enables us to use Docker and do that very thing, since Docker can run on Windows and Mac. ### 2. You own little heroku **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kenneth L. | Full Stack Developer, Internet, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 27, 2016 **What do you like best about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** Simplicity. Heroku got it right when they focused on making deployments easy for developers. Deis follows in those steps. You can even use heroku buildpacks to get your deployments right. **What do you dislike about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** When it screws up, it screws up catastrophically. **Recommendations to others considering Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS):** If you don't know much about infrastructure, Deis is perfect. Gets you going lightning fast. Very similar to heroku. But if you DO know about infrastructure and a bit of devops, you might want to do things yourself so you understand the magic behind Deis. Deis is a good stepping stone. We evaluated Deis, but found that it didn't meet our business needs. However, Deis is really quite nice to work with. **What problems is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Devops. Deis makes devops a lot simpler. ### 3. Azure is a solid container hosting solution **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 03, 2016 **What do you like best about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** Built on the Microsoft platform, there seems to be some reliability there. **What do you dislike about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** Sometimes the data migration is not very clean and seems to be prone to errors. **What problems is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) solving and how is that benefiting you?** I'm trying to optimize the configuration of popular open source tools and technologies specifically for Azure and this solution does that. I am definitely realizing the benefits. ### 4. amazingly versatile and highly scalable micro-PaaS project with very little complicated overhead. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Imran H. | Software Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 18, 2016 **What do you like best about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** - Deis is an open source project; there are numerous very good contributors to this project giving it a firm support - Deis has built-in docker support, and it drives the meaning of micro-PaaS using docker. -Adopted key features of CoreOS to drive their clustered, highly-distributed architecture. - Uses CoreOS as a wholesale, meaning same OS for driving docker and also for service discovery. - has a robust, scalable systems layer to drive service discovery, task scheduling, and cluster management based on top of CoreOS - very similar spec format to Dockerfile, for application management and whole platform alike. - service oriented architecture, which is very much important in micro-PaaS based projects. **What do you dislike about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** - Complete CoreOS dependency, once you adopt Deis, you have to use etcd for example with discoerd for service discovery. - at the moment, doesnt possess a good monitoring solution. - Database services appeal is weak - Install and setting up Deis require more experience with infrastructure development. **Recommendations to others considering Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS):** Please get yourself well acqauinted with CoreOS and Docker. Deis is completely hands in glove with CoreOS and golang, so these two tech are must precursor before using CoreOS. **What problems is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) solving and how is that benefiting you?** large datacenter agnostic , highly scalable PaaS framework that uses docker as baseline technology to handle large volume of distributed builds. ### 5. Deis is currently the best OpenSource PaaS on the Market **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jason W. | Chief Technology Officer, Internet, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 21, 2016 **What do you like best about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** Deis was very easy to setup and was able to be customized to our needs at Brandfolder. **What do you dislike about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** Open source as it is, Deis was meant to be a self-hosted alternative to Heroku. But to be honest, its not quite there yet. While deis is great for the command line user, it still lacks the beautiful user interface companion to the command line as Heroku does. **Recommendations to others considering Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS):** Have a good understanding of DevOps and CoreOS. When it comes to debugging sometimes (but not often) you will need to get your hands dirty. **What problems is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cost, Control, Deployability. Deis has absolutely helped us with these three facts, cutting our infrastructure costs by half. ### 6. Compared multiple PaaS systems, one of them was Deis **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Karolis R. | Senior Software Engineer, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 19, 2016 **What do you like best about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** Apparently it already has version 1, which is quite good and comforting when compared to other platforms as a service. It's also Open Source, written in Go so I really like it from developers perspective **What do you dislike about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** not sure whether it's a good choice when thinking long term - hybrid cloud (private + public) could would present many obstacles. Choosing other platforms like openshift or kubernetes would enable seamless migration between your on premise solution to public cloud (GCE) without modifying your templates. **What problems is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) solving and how is that benefiting you?** PaaS is the future, it enables developers to deploy and control their applications. They also move away the need to manually install databases, applications, caches and configure loadbalances. ### 7. Solid PaaS based on great technology, but not quite there yet **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Piotr Z. | Founder, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 18, 2016 **What do you like best about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** It uses the great environment provided by CoreOS and is pretty much the best "light" PaaS solution when you're running a bunch of servers handling user traffic. The monitoring is quite nice too and support for Heroku buildpacks provides a solid base for any project, so that you can set the whole thing up in just a few hours. **What do you dislike about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** For smaller deployments, you can't reuse the server for both database and frontend handling. It still requires service support, without that it will not gain that many users. **What problems is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Encrypted storage, email and so on. It simplified our continuous delivery process, which was the greatest benefit. ### 8. Great tech **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 08, 2016 **What do you like best about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** I love the technologies it uses to underly it, namely k8s, ceph, the interface. **What do you dislike about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** It's not easy to debug and I've had a cluster that just failed with no apparent reason in the logs. **What problems is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data munging, APIs, frontends. ### 9. Used Deis for a while as an alternative to an internally developed tool **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 21, 2016 **What do you like best about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** Simple Heroku style platform that enables a git-push deploy to whichever hosting environment you choose to use. Most tools are simple to extend and implement necessary business rules required for stricter environments. The 2.x branch switching to Kubernetes is a smart move, following industry trends and positions Deis as a great PaaS offering everywhere that k8s is. **What do you dislike about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** Some operational aspects (in the 1.x series) are difficult to manage, particularly around HA. **Recommendations to others considering Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS):** Its a great system. The new 2.x version is shaping up into a very nice tool. **What problems is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) solving and how is that benefiting you?** We essentially want to have a simple platform for developing internally produced applications to AWS. ### 10. Deis completes Kubernetes **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jeremiah L. | Staff Software Engineer, Web API Technical Product Manager, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 19, 2016 **What do you like best about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** Deis allows your ops team to focus on infrastructure and your developers to focus on their apps. It's the satisfying developer experience of Heroku without the pain and cost of Heroku. **What do you dislike about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** Deis has gone through several iterations that have kept it in a continuously stable-beta-like state, but it feels justified given where it's ended up. **What problems is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Node.js deployment onto bare metal servers in a managed datacenter. ### 11. Promising and interesting product **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Erik R. | Web Developer, Marketing and Advertising, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 18, 2016 **What do you like best about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** Easy to scale and innovative command line interface! **What do you dislike about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** A bit of a hassle to setup on my cloud on linode.com (more linodes fault...). A lot of documentation before I was able to get it ready for my environment. **What problems is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) solving and how is that benefiting you?** If it works well I will be able to scale my services effortless and get rid of them bash scripts. ### 12. Promising plans but isn't usable in production yet **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Евгений . | Управляющий партнёр, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 02, 2016 **What do you like best about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** Good architecture, predictable components, popular use cases. **What do you dislike about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** Stability, clustering. Ability to manage users and roles. **Recommendations to others considering Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS):** Wait next release. **What problems is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Launching from small to medium web-sites. Easy deploy. ### 13. Using Deis as a Platform as a Service and getting the best features **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 18, 2016 **What do you like best about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** The fact that it is open source and is trusted by a lot of people in the community ! Great experience using Deis ! **What do you dislike about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** Pretty much nothing! The user experience has been rewarding so far ! **What problems is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Build our own custom CRM and used Deis as Platform as a service to get all the features of a great platform and without any hassles ! ### 14. Your own PaaS for free **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 18, 2016 **What do you like best about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** It's straightforward to understand if you know about docker and other services like heroku **What do you dislike about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** It's still green and I found it's evolving fast so many tutorials or docs that I've read around might be deprecated **What problems is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) solving and how is that benefiting you?** We had a web app that were running several microservices and connect each other as needed .. we used deis as our staging infrastructure ### 15. Makes life easier **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Accounting | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 19, 2016 **What do you like best about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** Helped make setting up our Docker environment easy. Before using Deis it was a lot of painful bash scripts to glue things together and the Docker environment never felt like the right choice at the time. **What do you dislike about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** I don't have anything bad to say about the product. **What problems is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Building microservices and distributed systems ### 16. Heroku Killer. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Package/Freight Delivery | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 18, 2016 **What do you like best about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** Simple workflow, support Docker really well, and tons of programming langs. **What do you dislike about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?** Design and documentation. Design seems to simple and documentation doesn't support other langs. **What problems is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Clone of hot business, Deis enables me to rapid prototyping. ## Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Discussions - [What is azure Kubernetes service aks?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-azure-kubernetes-service-aks) - 1 comment - [View Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/azure-kubernetes-service-aks/reviews?page=3§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-08-10+13%3A09%3A01+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=40710cdb-0c8a-4b04-a420-36ebd6c8df60&secure%5Btoken%5D=51ebebf545a4fd6fea94e0d04a0ffe6500e20814d639dccb11d24056cdb1ed70&format=llm_user) ## Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Features **Management** - Access Control **Organization** - Packaging - Container Networking - Orchestration **Development** - Developer Toolkit - Architecture - Datacenter - Virtualization ## Top Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Alternatives - [Red Hat OpenShift](https://www.g2.com/products/red-hat-red-hat-openshift/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (290 reviews) - [Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (formerly Docker Enterprise)](https://www.g2.com/products/mirantis-kubernetes-engine-formerly-docker-enterprise/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (277 reviews) - [Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-elastic-container-service-amazon-ecs/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (249 reviews)