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Picking the Right Solution

Kubernetes can run on various platforms: from your laptop, to VMs on a cloud provider, to a rack of bare metal servers. The effort required to set up a cluster varies from running a single command to crafting your own customized cluster. Use this guide to choose a solution that fits your needs.

If you just want to “kick the tires” on Kubernetes, use the local Docker-based solutions.

When you are ready to scale up to more machines and higher availability, a hosted solution is the easiest to create and maintain.

Turnkey cloud solutions require only a few commands to create and cover a wide range of cloud providers. On-Premises turnkey cloud solutions have the simplicity of the turnkey cloud solution combined with the security of your own private network.

If you already have a way to configure hosting resources, use kubeadm to easily bring up a cluster with a single command per machine.

Custom solutions vary from step-by-step instructions to general advice for setting up a Kubernetes cluster from scratch.

• Local-machine Solutions
• Hosted Solutions
• Turnkey Cloud Solutions
• On-Premises turnkey cloud solutions
• Custom Solutions
• Table of Solutions

Local-machine Solutions

Community Supported Tools

• Minikube is a method for creating a local, single-node Kubernetes cluster for development and testing. Setup is completely automated and doesn’t require a cloud provider account.

• Kubeadm-dind is a multi-node (while minikube is single-node) Kubernetes cluster which only requires a docker daemon. It uses docker-in-docker technique to spawn the Kubernetes cluster.

Ecosystem Tools

• Docker Desktop is an easy-to-install application for your Mac or Windows environment that enables you to start coding and deploying in containers in minutes on a single-node Kubernetes cluster.

• Minishift installs the community version of the Kubernetes enterprise platform OpenShift for local development & testing. It offers an all-in-one VM (minishift start) for Windows, macOS, and Linux. The container start is based on oc cluster up (Linux only). You can also install the included add-ons.

• MicroK8s provides a single command installation of the latest Kubernetes release on a local machine for development and testing. Setup is quick, fast (~30 sec) and supports many plugins including Istio with a single command.

• IBM Cloud Private-CE (Community Edition) can use VirtualBox on your machine to deploy Kubernetes to one or more VMs for development and test scenarios. Scales to full multi-node cluster.

• IBM Cloud Private-CE (Community Edition) on Linux Containers is a Terraform/Packer/BASH based Infrastructure as Code (IaC) scripts to create a seven node (1 Boot, 1 Master, 1 Management, 1 Proxy and 3 Workers) LXD cluster on Linux Host.

• Kind, Kubernetes IN Docker is a tool for running local Kubernetes clusters using Docker containers as “nodes”. It is primarily designed for testing Kubernetes, initially targeting the conformance tests.

• Ubuntu on LXD supports a nine-instance deployment on localhost.

Hosted Solutions

• AppsCode.com provides managed Kubernetes clusters for various public clouds, including AWS and Google Cloud Platform.

• APPUiO runs an OpenShift public cloud platform, supporting any Kubernetes workload. Additionally APPUiO offers Private Managed OpenShift Clusters, running on any public or private cloud.

• Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes offers managed Kubernetes service.

• Azure Kubernetes Service offers managed Kubernetes clusters.

• Containership Kubernetes Engine (CKE) intuitive Kubernetes cluster provisioning and management on GCP, Azure, AWS, Packet, and DigitalOcean. Seamless version upgrades, autoscaling, metrics, workload creation, and more.

• DigitalOcean Kubernetes offers managed Kubernetes service.

• Giant Swarm offers managed Kubernetes clusters in their own datacenter, on-premises, or on public clouds.

• Google Kubernetes Engine offers managed Kubernetes clusters.

• IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service offers managed Kubernetes clusters with isolation choice, operational tools, integrated security insight into images and containers, and integration with Watson, IoT, and data.

• Kubermatic provides managed Kubernetes clusters for various public clouds, including AWS and Digital Ocean, as well as on-premises with OpenStack integration.

• Kublr offers enterprise-grade secure, scalable, highly reliable Kubernetes clusters on AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-premise. It includes out-of-the-box backup and disaster recovery, multi-cluster centralized logging and monitoring, and built-in alerting.

• KubeSail is an easy, free way to try Kubernetes.

• Madcore.Ai is devops-focused CLI tool for deploying Kubernetes infrastructure in AWS. Master, auto-scaling group nodes with spot-instances, ingress-ssl-lego, Heapster, and Grafana.

• Nutanix Karbon is a multi-cluster, highly available Kubernetes management and operational platform that simplifies the provisioning, operations, and lifecycle management of Kubernetes.

• OpenShift Dedicated offers managed Kubernetes clusters powered by OpenShift.

• OpenShift Online provides free hosted access for Kubernetes applications.

• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) is a fully-managed, scalable, and highly available service that you can use to deploy your containerized applications to the cloud.

• Platform9 offers managed Kubernetes on-premises or on any public cloud, and provides 24/7 health monitoring and alerting. (Kube2go, a web-UI driven Kubernetes cluster deployment service Platform9 released, has been integrated to Platform9 Sandbox.)

• Stackpoint.io provides Kubernetes infrastructure automation and management for multiple public clouds.

• SysEleven MetaKube offers managed Kubernetes as a service powered on our OpenStack public cloud. It includes lifecycle management, administration dashboards, monitoring, autoscaling and much more.

• VMware Cloud PKS is an enterprise Kubernetes-as-a-Service offering in the VMware Cloud Services portfolio that provides easy to use, secure by default, cost effective, SaaS-based Kubernetes clusters.

Turnkey Cloud Solutions

These solutions allow you to create Kubernetes clusters on a range of Cloud IaaS providers with only a few commands. These solutions are actively developed and have active community support.

• Agile Stacks
• Alibaba Cloud
• APPUiO
• AWS
• Azure
• CenturyLink Cloud
• Conjure-up Kubernetes with Ubuntu on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud
• Containership
• Docker Enterprise
• Gardener
• Giant Swarm
• Google Compute Engine (GCE)
• IBM Cloud
• Kontena Pharos
• Kubermatic
• Kublr
• Madcore.Ai
• Nirmata
• Nutanix Karbon
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE)
• Pivotal Container Service
• Rancher 2.0
• Stackpoint.io
• Supergiant.io
• VMware Cloud PKS
• VMware Enterprise PKS

On-Premises turnkey cloud solutions

These solutions allow you to create Kubernetes clusters on your internal, secure, cloud network with only a few commands.

• Agile Stacks
• APPUiO
• Docker Enterprise
• Giant Swarm
• GKE On-Prem | Google Cloud
• IBM Cloud Private
• Kontena Pharos
• Kubermatic
• Kublr
• Mirantis Cloud Platform
• Nirmata
• OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) by Red Hat
• Pivotal Container Service
• Rancher 2.0
• SUSE CaaS Platform
• SUSE Cloud Application Platform
• VMware Enterprise PKS

Custom Solutions

Kubernetes can run on a wide range of Cloud providers and bare-metal environments, and with many base operating systems.

If you can find a guide below that matches your needs, use it.

Universal

If you already have a way to configure hosting resources, use kubeadm to bring up a cluster with a single command per machine.

Cloud

These solutions are combinations of cloud providers and operating systems not covered by the above solutions.

• Cloud Foundry Container Runtime (CFCR)
• Gardener
• Kublr
• Kubernetes on Ubuntu
• Kubespray
• Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE)
• VMware Essential PKS

On-Premises VMs

• Cloud Foundry Container Runtime (CFCR)
• CloudStack (uses Ansible)
• Fedora (Multi Node) (uses Fedora and flannel)
• Nutanix AHV
• OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) Kubernetes platform by Red Hat
• oVirt
• VMware Essential PKS
• VMware vSphere
• VMware vSphere, OpenStack, or Bare Metal (uses Juju, Ubuntu and flannel)

Bare Metal

• Digital Rebar
• Docker Enterprise
• Fedora (Single Node)
• Fedora (Multi Node)
• Kubernetes on Ubuntu
• OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) Kubernetes platform by Red Hat
• VMware Essential PKS

Integrations

These solutions provide integration with third-party schedulers, resource managers, and/or lower level platforms.

• DCOS
  • Community Edition DCOS uses AWS
  • Enterprise Edition DCOS supports cloud hosting, on-premises VMs, and bare metal

Table of Solutions

Below is a table of all of the solutions listed above.

Note: The above table is ordered by version test/used in nodes, followed by support level.

Definition of columns

• IaaS Provider is the product or organization which provides the virtual or physical machines (nodes) that Kubernetes runs on.
• OS is the base operating system of the nodes.
• Config. Mgmt. is the configuration management system that helps install and maintain Kubernetes on the nodes.
• Networking is what implements the networking model. Those with networking type none may not support more than a single node, or may support multiple VM nodes in a single physical node.
• Conformance indicates whether a cluster created with this configuration has passed the project’s conformance tests for supporting the API and base features of Kubernetes v1.0.0.
• Support Levels
  • Project: Kubernetes committers regularly use this configuration, so it usually works with the latest release of Kubernetes.
  • Commercial: A commercial offering with its own support arrangements.
  • Community: Actively supported by community contributions. May not work with recent releases of Kubernetes.
  • Inactive: Not actively maintained. Not recommended for first-time Kubernetes users, and may be removed.
• Notes has other relevant information, such as the version of Kubernetes used.

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