Comparison

Aureus vs AWS (EKS / ECS)

AWS EKS and ECS are powerful platforms. But operating production infrastructure on Kubernetes — whether you're running databases, application services, background workers, or all of the above — requires deep, ongoing expertise that most product teams don't have and shouldn't need to build.

Aureus gives you dedicated bare metal clusters with private Kubernetes environments, operated entirely by our team. You get the isolation and performance of owning the hardware without the operational burden of running Kubernetes yourself.

Aureus

  • Dedicated physical server — nothing shared
  • Private Kubernetes cluster, fully managed
  • Any stack: apps, databases, workers, services
  • Provisioned in hours, not weeks
  • Backups, HA, patching, monitoring — all included
  • Flat predictable monthly pricing

AWS EKS / ECS

  • EC2 on shared hypervisor (Nitro)
  • EBS network-attached storage
  • You own deployments, scaling, HA, patching
  • Backups require Velero or custom tooling
  • Multi-part billing: EC2 + EBS + EKS + egress
  • Your team owns all incidents

What AWS actually costs for a production cluster

A minimum viable HA production environment on EKS (us-east-1, 3-node cluster, 2 TB storage, basic monitoring):

EKS control plane$72/mo
3× m6i.2xlarge nodes (min HA)$~870/mo
EBS storage (2 TB)$~160/mo
CloudWatch / monitoring$~80/mo
Data transfer + NAT gateway$~120/mo
DevOps engineer time (partial FTE)$~2,000+/mo
Total estimate$3,300+/mo

Estimates based on AWS us-east-1 on-demand pricing, March 2026. Engineer time at $120k/year blended cost, 20% allocation.

Feature
Aureus
AWS EKS / ECS
Infrastructure
Cluster provisioning
Provisioned by Aureus in hours, zero config required
EKS cluster + node groups + VPC + subnets + IAM + security groups + storage class — days of work minimum
Hardware model
Dedicated physical server — one per customer, no virtualisation layer
EC2 instances on shared hypervisor (Nitro) — vCPUs contend with other tenants on the same host
Storage
Local NVMe SSD — sub-0.1 ms latency, no network hop
EBS gp3/io2 via CSI driver — network-attached, 0.5–2 ms latency, charged separately per GB
Resource isolation
Dedicated physical server — no noisy neighbours possible
Pods share EC2 nodes with other workloads — CPU, memory, and I/O contention
Stack support
Any stack, any database, any service — designed around your workload
Any stack — but you own every deployment, config, and integration decision
Operations
Operational complexity
LowManaged entirely by Aureus — you ship code
HighYour team owns the Kubernetes control plane, node upgrades, pod scheduling, health checks, autoscaling, and DR
Deployments
Zero-downtime rolling deploys managed by Aureus, with pre-flight health checks and automatic rollback
Your team owns deployment pipelines — CI/CD, rollout strategies, and rollback logic
Backups
Continuous streaming backups, 30-day retention, weekly restore tests — all managed and verified
Requires Velero, cloud-native snapshots, or custom tooling — your team owns backup integrity and DR tests
High availability
Built-in HA with automated failover — included across all tiers
Requires multi-AZ node groups, pod anti-affinity rules, and careful readiness probe configuration
Monitoring & alerting
24/7 infrastructure monitoring included — Aureus on-call is paged, not you
Requires CloudWatch, Prometheus + Grafana stack, or a third-party APM — additional cost and setup
Security patching
OS and runtime patches applied by Aureus — critical CVEs within 48h
Your team manages node AMI updates, container image patching, and Kubernetes version upgrades
Cost
Pricing model
Flat monthly — fully predictable, no surprise bills
EC2 + EBS + EKS control plane ($0.10/hr) + data transfer + NAT gateway + monitoring — highly variable
Engineering overhead
Zero — no Kubernetes expertise required on your team
Kubernetes engineers cost $150–250k/year. EKS clusters require continuous expert maintenance
Incident response
Aureus on-call engineers — included
Your on-call rotation, or AWS Business Support at minimum $100/mo with no SLA on response quality
Security
Attack surface
Minimal — private cluster, no public Kubernetes API server, no exposed etcd
EKS exposes a Kubernetes API server, etcd, RBAC, service accounts, admission webhooks — significant attack surface
Hardware-level isolation
Physical server isolation — no shared CPU caches, no side-channel risk
Nitro hypervisor mitigations applied, but silicon is still shared with other AWS customers
Pre-launch security review
Every application reviewed before going live — OWASP, dependency scanning, secrets detection
Optional — your team's responsibility to implement and enforce
Developer Experience
Time to first deploy
Hours from request to live production environment
Days to weeks depending on team Kubernetes experience and account configuration
Configuration access
Full access to all configuration — Aureus engineers execute changes safely
Full access — but changes require careful pod orchestration to avoid downtime

When AWS EKS is the right choice

If you already have a mature Kubernetes platform team and need deep integration with the AWS ecosystem — IAM roles, S3, SQS, CloudFront — EKS is a reasonable choice. If your organisation has compliance requirements that mandate staying within a single cloud provider, EKS may be the only option.

Aureus is for engineering teams whose core business is not running Kubernetes. The infrastructure expertise lives at Aureus — not on your team.

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