STACKIT 2: STACKIT vs AWS — Core Services Compared
If you have built your infrastructure on AWS, the first practical question when looking at STACKIT is simple: what replaces what? This post maps STACKIT’s core services against their AWS equivalents. STACKIT does not mirror every service in the AWS catalogue, but for standard production workloads, the coverage is strong.
Compute: EC2 → STACKIT Compute Engine
STACKIT Compute Engine provides virtual machine instances built on OpenStack Nova. The configuration model is familiar: you choose vCPUs, RAM, and a boot image, much like you would with EC2. Flavours, which are the OpenStack term for instance types, range from small development instances through to larger compute-focused options.
Instances run on hardware hosted in Germany and Austria. Hypervisor level operations are handled by STACKIT’s own engineering team, without third party dependencies in the compute layer.
Object Storage: S3 → STACKIT Object Storage
Object Storage STACKIT Object Storage is S3 compatible. The same AWS SDKs, CLI tools, and application code that work with S3 will generally work with STACKIT Object Storage. The endpoint URL and credentials change, but the API stays the same.
For applications that already store and retrieve objects through the S3 API, moving to STACKIT Object Storage is usually more of a configuration change than a code change. Bucket policies, versioning, and lifecycle rules are all supported.
Managed Databases: RDS → STACKIT Managed Databases
STACKIT offers a broad range of managed database services. PostgreSQL Flex and MariaDB cover relational workloads. MongoDB Flex supports document store use cases. Redis is available for caching and session storage. OpenSearch handles full-text search. SQL Server Flex is there for teams with existing Microsoft SQL Server workloads.
The Flex naming convention means these are managed services with configurable resource allocation. You choose CPU, RAM, and storage separately instead of picking from a fixed list of instance types. That gives you more control over the balance between cost and performance.
Kubernetes: EKS → STACKIT Kubernetes Engine (SKE)
STACKIT Kubernetes Engine, or SKE, provides managed Kubernetes clusters using standard upstream Kubernetes. Cluster creation, node pool management, and version upgrades are handled through the STACKIT console or API.
SKE integrates with STACKIT Load Balancers and Object Storage for persistent volume claims. Standard Kubernetes ingress controllers such as Nginx and Traefik, along with Helm deployments, work without modification.
As with Scaleway Kapsule, the control plane is included in the service. STACKIT does not charge separately for the Kubernetes control plane, which makes this a meaningful cost difference compared with AWS EKS.
Messaging: Kinesis / SQS / SNS → STACKIT RabbitMQ
STACKIT’s managed messaging service is RabbitMQ, a widely used open source message broker built on the AMQP protocol. That is a different model from AWS SQS, which uses HTTP, and Kinesis, which is based on a proprietary streaming API.
For teams moving from SQS or SNS, this means switching client libraries from the AWS SDK messaging clients to an AMQP client library. The messaging patterns themselves, such as queues, exchanges, and publish subscribe, translate reasonably well, but the API does not. In practice, that makes it a manageable migration step, but still a code change rather than just a configuration change.
For teams migrating from Kinesis, RabbitMQ Streams offer similar persistent, replayable event-streaming capabilities, though with different throughput characteristics. If you are dealing with high volume Kinesis workloads, benchmarking is sensible before making a commitment.
Monitoring: CloudWatch → STACKIT Observability + LogMe
STACKIT Observability provides infrastructure metrics using a Prometheus-compatible stack. Dashboards are based on Grafana. LogMe provides managed log aggregation and works with standard log shippers such as Fluentd and Logstash.
For teams already using Prometheus and Grafana with CloudWatch as a fallback, moving to STACKIT Observability is fairly straightforward. The same dashboard setups, alerting rules, and exporters will generally continue to work.
DNS: Route 53 → STACKIT DNS
STACKIT DNS provides managed DNS for domains hosted within the platform. It supports standard record types and integrates with other STACKIT services for automatic record management in Kubernetes environments.
What Is Not Directly Available
STACKIT does not currently offer a direct equivalent to AWS Lambda. For serverless workloads, the closest option is to run containerised applications on SKE using Kubernetes native autoscaling and scale-to-zero patterns.
STACKIT’s CDN offering is also less mature than AWS CloudFront. For businesses with significant CDN requirements, it is worth considering a third party CDN in front of STACKIT.
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