You’ve got two clouds, one team, and a pile of YAML that decides whether everything works or everyone spends their Friday night debugging IAM errors. Bringing Amazon EKS together with Google Compute Engine feels like strapping two engines to one rocket. But once you understand how identity, networking, and workloads align, it flies.
EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) gives you managed Kubernetes control planes on AWS. Google Compute Engine, on the other hand, provides flexible, VM-based compute on Google Cloud. Each excels at what it does, yet most teams run mixed infrastructure whether they admit it or not. The goal isn’t to pick sides but to make these systems trust each other across identity and runtime boundaries.
The trick is unified authentication and workload portability. EKS workloads often need to consume services hosted on Google Compute Engine through private networks or APIs. Instead of juggling static keys or cross-cloud VPN tunnels, use federated identity via OIDC or short-lived credentials so your pods authenticate safely using service accounts. You can extend IAM trust between AWS and Google’s IAM so workloads assume roles securely, no hardcoded secrets required.
How do you connect EKS and Google Compute Engine?
At a high level, configure your EKS service account with an OIDC identity provider that maps to a Google Cloud service account. Grant the right IAM roles on the Compute Engine side, restrict the network routes, and confirm your Kube pods use those federated credentials. That’s the logic in a nutshell—short-lived tokens, least privilege, no manual key rotation.
Best practices when linking them
Audit every trust boundary. Use AWS IAM roles for service accounts with minimal scope and align them with Google IAM roles that mirror function, not team ownership. Monitor access patterns, not just logs, since misaligned roles show up as latency before they show up as incidents. When CI pipelines trigger cross-cloud services, isolate those identities too.