IâÂÂve 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? Depends on your use case, if you don;t have enough folks to handle then managed control plane makes things simpler If you prefer bare metal use tools such as cluster-API/talos etc to handle the automation. Cost - I run a k3s cluster on Hertzner bare-metal nodes and save about $150/month compared to managed offerings. Of course, I am doing the maintenance myself, but so far so good.