I am looking forwards to digging in to this a bit more and figuring out how this compares to Istio. I am guessing integration with AWS services such as X-ray and Cloudwatch/logs are the selling point. Still, I am a bit weary about configuring things that run inside your Kubernetes cluster through amazon apis, and not k8s resources. However, you could easily create a custom resource for this. Maybe that is to come? EKS is still young and they are yet to figure a lot of things out, from what i've seen, the roadmap is promising though. I have been working with it a lot, kops still wins for small/medium workloads in production, but I doubt for much longer.