Kubernetes — List of Managed Service, Installer and Serverless Depolyment
List and describe the tools and services that build and manage kubernetes
Kubenetes is growing fast since in the market of Container as Service and Function as Service since it can be deployed any where — on prem or the cloud. It is gaining popularity due to its ability not to vendor lock-in where you can deploy both container and cloud serveless functions.
You can get an introduction about Kubernetes in the link below -
Managed Kubernetes Services
Managed Kubernetes services relieve you of almost all the administration overhead of setting up and running Kubernetes clusters, particularly the control plane. Effectively, a managed service means you pay for someone else (such as AWS ) to run the cluster for you.
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
As you’d expect from the originators of Kubernetes, Google offers a fully managed Kubernetes service that is completely integrated with the Google Cloud Platform. Just choose the number of worker nodes, and click a button in the GCP web console to create a cluster, or use the Deployment Manager tool to provision one. Within a few minutes, your cluster will be ready to use. Google takes care of monitoring and replacing failed nodes, auto-applying security patches, and high availability for the control plane and etcd. You can set your nodes to auto-upgrade to the latest version of Kubernetes, during a maintenance window of your choice. With the GKE Serveless Add-on you can also run it as Serveless.
Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS)
Amazon has also been providing managed container cluster services for a long time, but until very recently the only option was Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon’s proprietary technology. While perfectly usable, ECS is not as powerful or flexible as Kubernetes, and evidently even Amazon has decided that the future is Kubernetes, with the launch of Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS). It’s not quite as seamless an experience as Google Kubernetes Engine, so be prepared to do more of the setup work yourself. Also, unlike some competitors, EKS charges you for the master nodes as well as the other cluster infrastructure. This makes it more expensive, for a given cluster size, than either Google or Microsoft’s managed Kubernetes service. If you already have infrastructure in AWS, or run containerized workloads in the older ECS service that you want to move to Kubernetes, then EKS is a sensible choice.
As the newest entry into the managed Kubernetes marketplace, though, it has some distance to go to catch up to the Google and Microsoft offerings.
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Although Microsoft came a little later to the cloud business than Amazon or Google, they’re catching up fast. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) offers most of the features of its competitors, such as Google’s GKE. You can create clusters from the web interface or using the Azure az command-line tool.
As with GKE and EKS, you have no access to the master nodes, which are managed internally, and your billing is based on the number of worker nodes in your cluster.
OpenShift is more than just a managed Kubernetes service: it’s a full Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) product, which aims to manage the whole software development life cycle, including continuous integration and build tools, test runner, application deployment, monitoring, and orchestration.
OpenShift can be deployed to bare-metal servers, virtual machines, private clouds, and public clouds, so you can create a single Kubernetes cluster that spans all these environments. This makes it a good choice for very large organizations, or those with very heterogeneous infrastructure.
Naturally, the venerable IBM is not to be left out in the field of managed Kubernetes services. IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is pretty simple and straightforward, allowing you to set up a vanilla Kubernetes cluster in IBM Cloud. You can access and manage your IBM Cloud cluster through the default Kubernetes
CLI and the provided command-line tool, or a basic GUI. There are no real killer features that differentiate IBM’s offering from the other major cloud providers, but it’s a logical option if you’re already using IBM Cloud.
Heptio Kubernetes Subscription (HKS)
For large enterprises that want the security and flexibility of running clusters across multiple public clouds and getting support, Heptio Kubernetes Subscription (HKS) aims to provide just that. Heptio has a solid brand in the Kubernetes world. Heptio is now part of VMWare.
You can get a comparison of the cloud providers in the following link -
Turnkey Kubernetes Solutions
While managed Kubernetes services are a good fit for most business requirements, there may be some circumstances in which using managed services isn’t an option. There is a growing class of turnkey offerings, which aim to give you a ready-to-use, production-grade Kubernetes cluster by just clicking a button in a web browser. Turnkey Kubernetes solutions are attractive both to large enterprises (because they can have a commercial relationship with the vendor) and small companies with scarce engineering and operations resources. Here are a few of the options in the turnkey space.
Stackpoint is advertised as “The simplest way to deploy a Kubernetes cluster to the public cloud,” in as few as three clicks. There are various price points available, starting from $50 a month, and Stackpoint offers unlimited-node clusters, high availability for master nodes and for etcd, and support for federated clusters, which can span multiple clouds (see “Federated clusters” on page 97). As a compromise between self-hosted Kubernetes and fully managed services, Stackpoint is an attractive option for companies that want to be able to provision and manage Kubernetes from a web portal, but still run worker nodes on their own public cloud infrastructure.
Containership Kubernetes Engine (CKE)
CKE is another web-based interface for provisioning Kubernetes in the public cloud.It lets you get a cluster up and running with sensible defaults, or customize almost every aspect of the cluster for more demanding requirements.
Techtonic
Technotic also offer Kubernes based installation using CoreOS and also go to bring support for Openshift as well.
Rancher is an opens-source software for delivery Kubernets-as-a-Service. It is able to run in Multiple cloud.
Kubernetes Installers
If managed or turnkey clusters won’t work for you, then you’ll need to consider some level of Kubernetes self-hosting: that is, setting up and running Kubernetes yourself on your own machines.
It’s very unlikely that you’ll deploy and run Kubernetes completely from scratch, except for learning and demo purposes. The vast majority of people use one or more of the available Kubernetes installer tools or services to set up and manage their clusters.
kops is a command-line tool for automated provisioning of Kubernetes clusters. It’s part of the Kubernetes project, and has been around a long time as an AWS-specific tool, but is now adding beta support for Google Cloud, and support for other providers is planned.
kops supports building high-availability clusters, which makes it suitable for production Kubernetes deployments. It uses declarative configuration, just like Kubernetes resources themselves, and it can not only provision the necessary cloud resources and set up a cluster, but also scale it up and down, resize nodes, perform upgrades, and do other useful admin tasks.
Like everything in the Kubernetes world, kops is under rapid development, but it’s a relatively mature and sophisticated tool that is widely used. If you’re planning to run self-hosted Kubernetes in AWS, kops is a good choice.
Kubespray (formerly known as Kargo), a project under the Kubernetes umbrella, is a tool for easily deploying production-ready clusters. It offers lots of options, including high availability, and support for multiple platforms. Kubespray is focused on installing Kubernetes on existing machines, especially onpremise and bare-metal servers. However, it’s also suitable for any cloud environment, including private cloud (virtual machines that run on your own servers).
TK8 is a command-line tool for provisioning Kubernetes clusters that leverages both Terraform (for creating cloud servers) and Kubespray (for installing Kubernetes on them). Written in Go (of course), it supports installation on AWS, OpenStack, and bare-metal servers, with support for Azure and Google Cloud in the pipeline.
TK8 not only builds a Kubernetes cluster, but will also install optional add-ons for you, including Jmeter Cluster for load testing, Prometheus for monitoring, Jaeger, Linkerd or Zipkin for tracing, Ambassador API Gateway with Envoy for ingress and load balancing, Istio for service mesh support, Jenkins-X for CI/CD, and Helm or Kedge for packaging on Kubernetes.
kubeadm is part of the Kubernetes distribution, and it aims to help you install and maintain a Kubernetes cluster according to best practices. kubeadm does not provision the infrastructure for the cluster itself, so it’s suitable for installing Kubernetes on
bare-metal servers or cloud instances of any flavor. Many of the other tools and services we’ll mention in this chapter use kubeadm internally to handle cluster admin operations, but there’s nothing to stop you using it directly, if you want to.
Tarmak is a Kubernetes cluster life cycle management tool that is focused on making it easy and reliable to modify and upgrade cluster nodes. While many tools deal with this by simply replacing the node, this can take a long time and often involves moving a lot of data around between nodes during the rebuild process. Instead, Tarmak can repair or upgrade the node in place. Tarmak uses Terraform under the hood to provision the cluster nodes, and Puppet to manage configuration on the nodes themselves. This makes it quicker and safer to roll out changes to node configuration.
Puppet is a powerful, mature, and sophisticated general configuration management tool that is very widely used, and has a large open source module ecosystem. The officially supported Kubernetes module installs and configures Kubernetes on existing nodes, including high availability support for both the control plane and etcd.
Kubeformation is an online Kubernetes configurator that lets you choose the options for your cluster using a web interface, and will then generate configuration templates for your particular cloud provider’s automation API (for example, Deployment Man‐ager for Google Cloud, or Azure Resource Manager for Azure). Support for other cloud providers is in the pipeline. Using Kubeformation is perhaps not as simple as some other tools, but because it is a wrapper around existing automation tools such as Deployment Manager, it is very flexible. If you already manage your Google Cloud infrastructure using Deployment Manager, for example, Kubeformation will fit into your existing workflow perfectly.
Clusterless Container Services
If you really want to minimize the overhead of running container workloads, there’s yet another level above fully managed Kubernetes services. These are so-called clusterless services, such as Azure Container Instances or Amazon’s Fargate. Although there really is a cluster under the hood, you don’t have access to it via tools like kubectl. Instead, you specify a container image to run, and a few parameters like the CPU and memory requirements of your application, and the service does the rest.
Using Knative framework (provided via Add-On) you can now run serversless workload in the GKE cluster. It allows you to run serverless workload on on-prem as well. It utilizes Istio for routing traffic (layer 7) to the user endpoint to backend services. It can also do logging, monitoring and enforce compliance of service mesh.
According to Amazon, “Fargate is like EC2, but instead of a virtual machine, you get a container.” Unlike ECS, there’s no need to provision cluster nodes yourself and then
connect them to a control plane. You just define a task, which is essentially a set of instructions for how to run your container image, and launch it. Pricing is per-second
based on the amount of CPU and memory resources that the task consumes. It’s probably fair to say that Fargate makes sense for simple, self-contained, longrunning
compute tasks or batch jobs (such as data crunching) that don’t require much customization or integration with other services. It’s also ideal for build containers,
which tend to be short-lived, and for any situation where the overhead of managing worker nodes isn’t justified.
If you’re already using ECS with EC2 worker nodes, switching to Fargate will relieve you of the need to provision and manage those nodes. Fargate is available now in some regions for running ECS tasks, and is scheduled to support EKS by 2019.
Azure Container Instances (ACI)
Microsoft’s Azure Container Instances (ACI) service is similar to Fargate, but also offers integration with the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). For example, you can configure your AKS cluster to provision temporary extra Pods inside ACI to handle spikes or bursts in demand. Similarly, you can run batch jobs in ACI in an ad hoc way, without having to keep idle
nodes around when there’s no work for them to do. Microsoft calls this idea serverless containers, but we find that terminology both confusing (serverless usually refers to
cloud functions, or functions-as-a-service) and inaccurate (there are servers; you just can’t access them).
ACI is also integrated with Azure Event Grid, Microsoft’s managed event routing service. Using Event Grid, ACI containers can communicate with cloud services, cloud
functions, or Kubernetes applications running in AKS. You can create, run, or pass data to ACI containers using Azure Functions. The advantage of this is that you can run any workload from a cloud function, not just those using the officially supported (blessed) languages, such as Python or JavaScript.
If you can containerize your workload, you can run it as a cloud function, with all the associated tooling. For example, Microsoft Flow allows even nonprogrammers to build up workflows graphically, connecting containers, functions, and events.
