EKS has certainly been lagging behind GKE for a long time. I think that this release acknowledges that and closes the gap somewhat.

To address your other comments: * EKS has automatic updates on the roadmap, which I imagine is similar to release channels on GKE. * GKE Limits. Yes, they are much larger than EKS, which I guess matters a lot if you have a requirement to scale horizontally to thousands of nodes. * eksctl isn't necessary to use EKS, but they do encourage it. I personally use Terraform and kubectl. It's essentially a wrapper over the AWS CLI. For GKE you would use the gcloud tool. For EKS you can use the AWS CLI or eksctl. It is an open-source tool built by Weaveworks btw: https://eksctl.io/