What are the pieces of Kubernetes that need to be high availability in order to achieve the five nines of uptime for your infrastructure? For one, you should consider how much the cloud service provider (CSP) does for you on the backend.

For Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), nearly all of the components are managed out of the box. You don't have to worry about the manager nodes or any cost associated with them. GKE also has the most robust autoscaling functionality currently. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) both use a self-managed autoscaling function, which means that you're in charge of managing the scale out of your cluster by using autoscaling groups.

GKE is also able to handle automatic updates to the management nodes without user intervention, but also offers a turnkey automatic update along with AKS so that the operator can choose when seamless upgrade happens. EKS is still working out those details.

EKS provides highly available master/worker nodes across multiple Availability Zones (AZ), while GKE offers something similar in their regional mode, which is akin to AWS's regions. AKS currently does not provide HA for the master nodes, but the worker nodes in the cluster are spread across multiple AZ in order to provide HA.