= K8S on cloud or bare metal? =

I’ve been running one on bare-metal for the past week and do not see any upside to it. We are doing it for an internal survey purpose. Do you run yours bare-metal? Why?
I agree, it depends on your purpose and what resources you have available, servers, money, time, etc

I actually run my K8S on virtual machines in an on premises VMWare VCenter. I already had the resources and I mostly use it for testing with k8s. I started running on VMware initially just to learn k8s, but went to using it for test purposes

I did it for two of my clients. They wanted to go cloud native but at the same time, law requires to maintain data at my country (public sector)

One installed with kubeadm and other with rke

The kubeadm one offered total control but mix and matching operators could be a nightmare due versions. Rancher on the other side offers a set of curated helm charts that work just fine

If this is for personal use then this might not apply, but for enterprise deployments there are shades of management. The hyperscalers are a fully managed offering, but you can have managed bare metal so you’re not worrying about racking, cabling, patching firmware, etc…. Or you could have a managed control plane on bare metal, perhaps even in your colo. sometimes this costs more than a hyperscaler even, but has the advantage of allowing you to have a managed offering that is performant and close to your other data

IME the big rub for cloud comes from moving data. The automation is awesome, but if your data isn’t there already or if data is going to be leaving there then the bill willincredibly

The upsides are control of hardware, on-prem data, cost. But you need to have a solid deployment process where you can easily re-cycle a node. It helps a lot in troubleshooting scenarios with complex software to just hit the reset button. That's one of the advantages if you keep thinking IaC

We run about 30+ clusters globally bare metal including underlay network. I really enjoy the technology behind it. It's tough but I wouldn't change it for a hosted platform just from the joy it brings me personally

From aperspective, I think if you don't need special hardware or a ton of storage hardware, hosted solutions might be cheaper. Especially team salary/head count wise since the heavy lifting is covered

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