It’s common to pay for things to make them easier to configure/manage.

Red Hat OpenShift on RHEL, Pivotal Container Service on Ubuntu, Red Hat’s nextgen CoreOS based Kubernetes, Canonical’s Charmed Kubernetes Distribution on Ubuntu, etc. all have different config management , install, upgrade, patching mechanisms that vary from Ansible, to Terraform, to BOSH, to Juju. Some handle PXE bare metal, some don’t. Etc.

There usually are free / no pay versions of the above that you can use self-supported, but then you’ll also need to coordinate your own upgrades and use community forums for q&a rather than being able to contractually have someone looking out for you and answering your questions.

If you’d prefer to avoid lock-in, All of that plumbing would otherwise have to be configured and scripted yourself with your chosen toolchain plus the newer “k8s small tools” like Kubeadm, Kops, Kube-spray, etc.

As the old saying goes, open source is only free (as in beer) if your time has no value.

> It’s common to pay for things to make them easier to configure/manage.

Yes but in the case of RedHat specifically those goals are not achieved.

I’m sure IBM will make it better.

You probably don't want to configure kubernetes manually... Kops is a thing though, but it's still a lot error potential, if you want to go to production

This. We use Rancher within our data center, because configuring and managing k8s is not trivial. Rancher eases a lot of that pain for our small team.