What is managed Kubernetes?

1. Managed control plane

   With EKS, AKS or GKE, the provider runs the Kubernetes API servers and etcd, keeps them highly available and patches them. You still own worker nodes (unless using options such as AWS Fargate or GKE Autopilot), add-ons, networking, security policies and upgrades of your workloads.

2. Managed Kubernetes service

   A partner such as Celestibia operates the rest: cluster provisioning in code, node groups and autoscaling, ingress, observability, GitOps delivery, version upgrades, security hardening and 24/7 response.

• A highly available control plane across multiple Availability Zones.
• Control-plane patching and version availability.
• Integration with IAM, VPC networking, Elastic Load Balancing and ECR.
• Managed node groups and Fargate profiles to simplify worker nodes.

• Cluster and node upgrades on a regular cadence.
• Add-ons: ingress controllers, autoscalers, CSI drivers, observability agents.
• Security: RBAC, network policies, image scanning, secrets.
• Cost control: requests and limits, autoscaling, Spot capacity.
• Deployments and rollbacks, ideally through GitOps.

Kubernetes is powerful but operationally demanding. A managed control plane removes the hardest single component to run, and a managed service removes the ongoing toil of upgrades, scaling and incident response so product teams can focus on applications.

• EKS, AKS and GKE manage the control plane; you still own the rest unless you use a managed service.
• Upgrades, security and cost are the recurring work most teams underestimate.
• GitOps makes managed Kubernetes predictable to operate.

References

• Amazon EKS
• Kubernetes documentation: Overview