Amazon EKS Clusterhigh

• EKS control plane fully AWS-managed, single-tenant, across 3 AZs with auto scale/replace; on Quake AI you run the control plane on Nova instances, provisioned through Magnum or self-managed with OpenTofu, and you operate it.
• EKS regional API endpoint with SLA; Quake AI exposes the kube API via Neutron LB with floating IP.
• EKS charges a per-hour cluster platform fee on top of the underlying compute; Quake AI charges only for underlying Nova/Neutron/Cinder resources with no K8s platform fee.
• EKS managed nodes auto AMI updates, Spot integration; Quake AI self-managed nodes require manual OS image selection and update management.

AKS Clusterhigh

• Azure automatically provisions and manages the control plane at no additional cost (Free tier) or fixed fee (Standard tier with SLA), offloading health monitoring and upgrades; on Quake AI you provision a cluster through Magnum (openstack coe cluster create) or self-managed Kubernetes on Nova instances (OpenTofu plus kubeadm, k3s, or RKE2), and you operate the cluster after creation.
• No OpenStack integration; uses Azure Resource Manager for cluster lifecycle.
• Pre-configured with Azure-specific defaults and add-ons like application routing.
• Managed via Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) with auto-scaling and upgrades; Quake AI uses Nova instances provisioned via OpenTofu with user-managed scaling and upgrades.

Kubernetes Clusterhigh

• Uses proprietary DigitalOcean API (POST /v2/kubernetes/clusters) for provisioning; Quake AI users provision Nova instances via OpenTofu and bootstrap Kubernetes manually (kubeadm, k3s).
• No cluster templates; direct specification of node pools in create request. Quake AI uses OpenTofu modules or IaC patterns to define cluster topology.
• Fully managed control plane at no cost (HA mode is a paid optional add-on); on Quake AI you provision the control plane through Magnum or self-managed on Nova instances and operate it yourself, including HA configuration.
• Node pools consist of identical Droplet-based worker nodes managed solely via kubectl (no SSH access); Quake AI nodes are Nova instances with full SSH access via keypair.

GKE Clusterhigh

• GKE provides Autopilot mode with fully managed node provisioning and scaling by Google; on Quake AI you provision clusters through Magnum or self-managed Kubernetes on Nova instances and manage node scaling yourself.
• Control plane is fully managed with automatic upgrades through release channels; Quake AI requires user-provisioned and user-managed control plane nodes.
• Cluster creation uses gcloud CLI vs OpenStack CLI (openstack coe cluster create).
• Custom machine types, spot VMs, accelerators in node pools; Quake AI K8s nodes use standard Nova flavors.

No managed Kubernetes service (self-managed with CCM and CSI)high

• Similar self-managed model to Quake AI; both require users to provision servers and install Kubernetes with tools like OpenTofu/Terraform and k3s/kubeadm. Hetzner provides a Cloud Controller Manager and CSI driver, while Quake AI uses OpenStack-compatible storage and network integrations.
• Hetzner-specific cloud-provider=external CCM must be deployed manually in kube-system namespace.
• No cluster API or web UI for cluster lifecycle; all via Hetzner Cloud API token and kubectl.