Managing Kubernetes on the cloud

Installing and making a Kubernetes cluster usable and ready for production, as you saw in this chapter, is a very long and complex process. If any step goes wrong, your entire deployment might be useless. Because of this, many cloud providers are offering managed Kubernetes solutions—Kubernetes as a service, in a way. In this type of managed solution, the cloud provider or service provider will manage the master nodes of the cluster, which include all the Kubernetes controllers, the API server, and even the etcd database. This is a major advantage because using a managed service will mean that you don't have to worry about the maintenance of the master nodes, and so you won't have to worry about the following:

By forgetting these, we can focus on what's important, such as provisioning pods and creating workloads on our cluster. With managed services, the learning curve decreases dramatically because our staff can focus mainly on the functionality of Kubernetes instead of how it works in order for them to maintain it. 

At the time of writing, some managed Kubernetes services worth mentioning are from the following three biggest cloud providers:

Besides managed Kubernetes services, there are also several open-source projects and non-open-source projects that are Kubernetes-based. These projects are not entirely managed, but instead use Kubernetes in the backend to achieve their goals. The following are some more well-known projects: