Enterprise Scale Kubernetes Offerings

Various Enterprise Scale Kubernetes Offerings

Kubernetes (K8s) is the most famous product of CNCF in this decade. Ever since Google released its white paper on Kubernetes, this product has completely changed the IT ecosystem. Companies like Red Hat and IBM have stated they will not create any future software that doesn't run on Kubernetes. As per Google, everything in Google runs on containers.

Soon, VMs may be completely replaced by containers due to auto-scalability, HA capabilities, and cloud-readiness. When it comes to running open-source products in enterprise environments, there are many enterprise-ready Kubernetes flavours with advanced features on top of base Kubernetes.

Top 5 Kubernetes Offerings for Enterprise Customers

1. OpenShift

OpenShift sits at the top of all Kubernetes flavours. It is a Kubernetes distribution that uses base Kubernetes with many in-built features needed to run a full end-to-end application. It is open-source, with its upstream version managed by Red Hat who also provides enterprise support. OpenShift provides ARO and ROSA as PaaS offerings on Azure and AWS respectively.

2. Rancher

Another product that has made significant inroads after OpenShift. Rancher is considered 100% CNCF-compliant — compared to OpenShift which includes some non-CNCF components. Rancher has many nice features and is quite fast to deploy. It is widely used as a multi-cluster management platform.

3. EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service)

EKS is Amazon Web Services' managed Kubernetes service. Since AWS is the most widely used cloud provider, EKS is also the most widely used PaaS Kubernetes offering. It is fully managed and integrates seamlessly with other AWS services. If you're already invested in AWS, EKS is a natural choice with typically lower operational costs.

4. AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service)

Azure Kubernetes Service has gained major market share as Azure has become a top competitor to AWS. AKS is a fully managed PaaS offering of Kubernetes on Microsoft Azure. It provides great features including integration with Azure Active Directory and is the first choice if you are using Microsoft Azure Cloud.

5. GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine)

Google Kubernetes Engine is considered the best cloud-based offering of Kubernetes — since Kubernetes itself was developed by Google. Google has been running all its workloads on GKE, which makes it the most reliable and battle-tested Kubernetes PaaS in the market.

Even though all of these products are famous and provide different capabilities, our first recommendation is OpenShift or Rancher since they prevent vendor lock-in. However, the right choice depends on your budget — OpenShift and Rancher may have additional licensing costs on top of cloud infrastructure compared to native cloud offerings like EKS, AKS, or GKE.