There are 5.6 million developers worldwide using Kubernetes (K8s). The open-source technology is a mainstay of DevOps teams, offering a simple way to automate container management.
But fully managing a K8s environment is a highly technical task. If you’re not an experienced K8s engineer, the learning curve is steep, and it’ll take significant time and capital to pull off. Time and effort that doesn’t prioritize what really matters: building your application to outpace the competition. As a result, more developers are moving away from self-managing their K8s environments in favor of managed solutions.
That’s where our Managed Kubernetes (K8s) solution comes into play, offering the benefits of managed K8s on pure, bare metal hardware. You focus on building your app, and we keep the Kubernetes infrastructure running smoothly.
Managed Kubernetes (K8s) from servers.com is a managed solution for running containerized applications using Kubernetes on bare metal. servers.com manages the control plane and core cluster components. This enables users to deploy and scale applications without risking poor performance at the cluster level and ensures fast and reliable application delivery.
Kubernetes can be deployed in two ways: self-hosted or as a managed service.
If you choose to self-host, you will be responsible for managing the complete Kubernetes environment. That includes everything from setting up the cluster and managing worker nodes, to configuring networking, storage and updates.
Self-hosting requires a deep level of Kubernetes expertise and in most cases, the average engineer is unlikely to have the time or resources to manage a Kubernetes environment at scale, as it requires ongoing upgrades, monitoring and troubleshooting.
In these cases, it’s worth considering a managed Kubernetes service. If you opt for a managed solution, your infrastructure service provider will manage the Kubernetes environment on your behalf, including setup, scaling support, updates and maintenance.
Our Managed Kubernetes service is a fully managed platform. This means servers.com is responsible for managing the Kubernetes control plane, node provisioning, master node availability, Kubernetes version upgrades, scaling and recovery.
However, even though the service is managed, you can still maintain control over the configuration of your managed K8s cluster, worker node management, application deployment and choose when to initiate scaling requests and upgrades. And, as the user, you are free to deploy across any number of dedicated worker nodes.
Our Managed Kubernetes service is not a standalone product. Once set up, it acts as the orchestration layer across your fleet of servers.com bare metal servers, allowing you to automate the deployment, scaling and management of your cluster and orchestrate workloads.
If you’re interested in automating the deployment and management of your bare metal servers, then it’s worth considering Managed Kubernetes. Free to deploy across your servers.com hardware, it offers several key benefits:
With managed Kubernetes offerings, there’s no operational or financial overhead. Instead, you can re-invest time and money that would be required to hire Kubernetes architects, into application development and other business priorities.
Technical debt can become a challenge for companies running self-managed Kubernetes environments. This often stems from the complexity of upgrades, security patching and maintaining compatibility across the ecosystem. It’s easy to accumulate outdated components, insecure nodes, or manual ‘snowflake’ configurations that become expensive to fix later down the line.
With Managed Kubernetes from servers.com, our Kubernetes engineers are responsible for the administration of management tier functions (not the user), which significantly reduces the risk of technical debt. We handle updates, control plane reliability and integrations so you don’t end up with hidden inefficiencies and escalating costs.
Our Managed Kubernetes service supports continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD). Containerization of applications allows businesses to easily and continuously deploy new code and applications. This means updates can be made in real-time, without having to take an application down.
The service also supports API-driven provisioning, Terraform modules and CLI tools, making it even easier to integrate into CI/CD pipelines and DevOps workflows.
Unlike typical K8s services that rely on shared cloud infrastructure on virtual machines (VMs), our Managed Kubernetes service deploys worker nodes on fully isolated, high-performance bare metal servers. Each worker node runs on a dedicated server, guaranteeing consistent CPU, RAM and storage with no risk of performance degradation from resource contention in shared environments.
Because Managed Kubernetes run on dedicated servers, you’ll be able to customize your CPU, RAM and disk configurations and deploy optional GPU nodes for ML/AI workloads. Our Managed Kubernetes service is also compatible with custom DevOps tooling, meaning you can integrate any registry, observability stack or automation pipeline of your choice.
When you deploy Managed Kubernetes, you maintain full control over your underlying hardware including root access to worker nodes via iDRAC or IPMI. You also have access to advanced network configuration options (such as setting up private networks, LAG, and IPv6), built-in network redundancy and fault-tolerance.
Our Managed Kubernetes service is fully GitOps-ready and compatible with DevOps tooling. You can integrate any registry, observability stack or automation pipeline of your choice then provision and scale through Terraform, CLI or our API.
Managed Kubernetes is a simple way to orchestrate your applications, without having to take on the operational or financial overhead.
Offered as a complementary solution alongside servers.com deployments, it’s designed to take the hassle out of managing your mission-critical workloads by taking on the operational overhead for you.
If you’re interested in Kubernetes orchestration, reach out to our team.
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