Application-Level Performance Benchmarking of AWS EKS and Azure AKS for Microservice Workloads

Managed Kubernetes services are widely adopted to simplify cloud-native deployments, yet there is limited independent evidence comparing their application-level performance across controlled, equivalent workloads. As organisations increasingly rely on managed platforms, understanding practical differences between providers becomes critical. This paper presents an empirical benchmark of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) using three representative. NET microservices covering computational, transactional, and I/O-intensive patterns. Results show that EKS consistently achieves lower response times and higher throughput across all workloads. While power consumption and infrastructure costs are comparable in some configurations, performance-normalised analysis indicates superior efficiency on EKS.