> But I mean, in addition to the StackPoint subscription, you do also pay for the master node droplets when you use it, as well as paying for the worker droplets, right?
Yes, you pay for all of them, but therefor you get full control of the entire cluster.
> You won't be paying for those masters anymore with the managed offering, from any of the cloud vendors I've heard of announcing a managed offering.
Interesting, I didn't know about that. Not sure if I prefer this though. Might be another "surface" for the cloud providers to lock you in.
> It's really going to come down to, are the managed offerings as good, better, etc than the ones you can install yourself with a tool like kops (or are they as good as the ones that a service such as StackPoint can help you install for yourself?)
I guess things around kubernetes will slow down soon (hopefully) and I'll probably switch to something like kops/playbooks/etc. But right now things are still moving too fast for my taste, so I'm happy to abstract away as much as possible.
> I wonder, did you try installing Kubernetes for yourself before you tried StackPoint? If so, what distro(s) did you try and which ones did or didn't make the cut?
Yes, I experimented with different approaches for Kubernetes, Openshift and Rancher and I tested several cloud providers. In the end I found it wasn't worth the effort to learn and configure the whole thing from the ground up, since everything was constantly changing, like I said. Even if you have your cluster ready there is still a lot of work to be done for the deployment pipelines, cluster backups, etc.. For now I'm happy that creating/destroying a cluster is a matter of hitting a button, but I'm also excited to see what the future brings. Kubernetes is definitely one of the most amazing projects I've come across so far.
> > You won't be paying for those masters anymore with the managed offering, from any of the cloud vendors I've heard of announcing a managed offering.
> Interesting, I didn't know about that. Not sure if I prefer this though. Might be another "surface" for the cloud providers to lock you in.
If you want a serious HA-FT kubernetes cluster that is spread across and resilient against failures in a single AZ, and you don't have something like Stackpoint or a managed K8S offering to configure it for you, there is a pretty serious amount of work (and decent number of computers required) in order for you to get your cluster there.
That being said, I don't know how many "hosted, managed" K8S offerings there really are in GA right now to compare.
I'm counting GKE on GCP, AKS on Azure, IBM's new managed k8s offering, AWS/EKS (which is still in preview) and Digital Ocean's offering announced yesterday (which is still pre-beta.) As far as I know, all of those offerings will give you as many masters as you need to make a resilient cluster for free, and you only pay for the workers.
(Except for the offerings that are in preview mode, then I guess you just don't pay for any of it for now...)
> Platform - Certified Kubernetes - Hosted (21)
I guess there are also quite a few I haven't looked at yet. Those are just the platforms with hosted offerings.
Yes, you pay for all of them, but therefor you get full control of the entire cluster.
> You won't be paying for those masters anymore with the managed offering, from any of the cloud vendors I've heard of announcing a managed offering.
Interesting, I didn't know about that. Not sure if I prefer this though. Might be another "surface" for the cloud providers to lock you in.
> It's really going to come down to, are the managed offerings as good, better, etc than the ones you can install yourself with a tool like kops (or are they as good as the ones that a service such as StackPoint can help you install for yourself?)
I guess things around kubernetes will slow down soon (hopefully) and I'll probably switch to something like kops/playbooks/etc. But right now things are still moving too fast for my taste, so I'm happy to abstract away as much as possible.
> I wonder, did you try installing Kubernetes for yourself before you tried StackPoint? If so, what distro(s) did you try and which ones did or didn't make the cut?
Yes, I experimented with different approaches for Kubernetes, Openshift and Rancher and I tested several cloud providers. In the end I found it wasn't worth the effort to learn and configure the whole thing from the ground up, since everything was constantly changing, like I said. Even if you have your cluster ready there is still a lot of work to be done for the deployment pipelines, cluster backups, etc.. For now I'm happy that creating/destroying a cluster is a matter of hitting a button, but I'm also excited to see what the future brings. Kubernetes is definitely one of the most amazing projects I've come across so far.