Why We Moved from GKE to EKS When we initially adopted Kubernetes, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Autopilot seemed like the perfect choice — fully managed, minimal operational overhead, and quick to get started. But as our workloads matured, three major challenges started to surface: Rising and unpredictable costs Compliance constraints The need for deeper infrastructure control This blog walks through why we migrated to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) with Karpenter, the architectural changes we made, and the lessons we learned running production workloads post-migration. ⚠️ Why GKE Autopilot Started Falling Short 1. Cost Inefficiencies at Scale GKE Autopilot pricing is based on requested resources, not actual usage . This sounds fine at small scale — but as traffic grows, the gaps between requested and actual usage start to compound.…