Five strategies to accelerate Kubernetes

deployment in the enterprise

August 2020

Executive summary
As Kubernetes adoption spreads from early adopters to slower-moving
enterprises, many companies are discovering that while containers and
Kubernetes offer advantages around development, velocity, agility, and cost
management, they also create a new set of challenges to overcome. While there
are commonalities in the types of challenges enterprises encounter with
Kubernetes, there’s no true one-size-fits-all way to manage them but rather a
number of potential approaches, each with its own advantages and drawbacks.
The right approach to taming Kubernetes will depend on the size, technical
sophistication, and business goals of each organisation. In this white paper, we
examine the motivations most enterprises have when they adopt Kubernetes and
the challenges they often encounter, before diving into an analysis of five
Kubernetes strategies and the types of enterprises best suited to each approach.
 Introduction: Why enterprises adopt containers
and Kubernetes
Kubernetes and containers have been taking the world by storm. Containers have
been around as part of Linux for over 10 years but really started to take off when
Google open-sourced Kubernetes in 2014. Since then, both technologies have
been growing exponentially. 451 Research expects the container market to grow
30% year-over-year, while a survey of over 500 IT professionals done by Portworx
and Aqua Security in 2019 showed that 87% were using containers, nearly all of
them for production workloads. Meanwhile, membership in the Cloud Native
Computing Foundation grew by 50% from 2018 to 2019.

App 1 App 2 App 3

Bins/Lib Bins/Lib Bins/Lib App 1 App 2 App 3

Bins/Lib Bins/Lib Bins/Lib

Guest Guest Guest
OS OS OS
Container Engine

Hypervisor Operating System

Infrastructure Infrastructure

Machine Virtualization Containers

What are containers?

Containers package an application or a microservice with the libraries,

binaries and configuration files that it needs to run successfully. Unlike a
virtual machine (VM), each container does not have its own operating system,
instead running on a shared operating system. As a result, containers are very
lightweight and can run in any environment without modification.

Why are organisations so eager to adopt containers and Kubernetes? Most

organisations have multiple reasons for adopting containers, and while every
organisation’s specific motivations are different, there are commonalities.

These include:

• Reducing IT costs. Containers can be much more efficient than VM-based or

other legacy application architectures. They can be packed more densely on
instances, reducing the amount of resources needed to run the same
application, whether it’s in a data centre or in the cloud. Because containers
share operating systems, they are more lightweight than a virtual machine and
require less processing power, less memory, and less storage. Across an entire
organisation, the cost savings can be substantial.

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 • Improving developer productivity. Containers lend themselves to DevOps
approaches and overall higher development velocity. This means organisations
are able to develop, test, and deploy applications faster. They have more agility
to respond to changes in the market ecosystem and changes in customer
behaviour, as well as the ability to test how different applications deliver on
business goals. Each developer is able to accomplish more and do so quicker
with containers.

• Faster time to market. Along with the increased productivity is a shorter time
to market for each application, which translates to organisations being able to
use software to create a competitive advantage and stay ahead of other
market actors.

• Cross-environment portability. Containers work the same regardless of the

environment. This means that developers don’t have to worry that an
application that worked properly on the local machine won’t work in another
environment, contributing to increased productivity and faster time to market.
At the same time, containers can also make it easier for organisations to move
all or part of their infrastructure to the public cloud, making multi-cloud and
hybrid cloud strategies possible.

• Simpler operations. Containers can also be easier to operate. They are easier
and more cost-efficient to scale. Not only can each container scale
independently but the individual components of an app can scale independently
of each other too. They are also easier to upgrade, and facilitate advanced
upgrade techniques like rolling upgrades. In addition, failures are less likely to
bring down the entire app — a problem with one container is more likely to be
isolated in that container rather than bring the entire app down. Containers are
also more portable than monoliths and run the same regardless of the
environment, so they are less likely to have environment-related issues in
production that don’t show up during development and testing.

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration system that was

originally developed by Google and released as an open source project in
2014. The name ‘Kubernetes’ comes from the Greek word for ‘helmsman’ or
‘pilot.’ Kubernetes, also called K8s, provides declarative configuration and
automation for managing container orchestration, and automates the
deployment, scaling, and operations of containers. In addition to managing
scaling, Kubernetes handles service discovery, load balancing, storage
orchestration, self-healing, and secret management. Kubernetes is now
surrounded by a massive ecosystem of supporting tools and hosted by the
Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It was the first CNCF project to
officially graduate. In the CNCF 2019 survey, 78% of respondents reported
using Kubernetes in production.

Read more about what Kubernetes is — and is not — on the project page.

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 But containers are also very complex. Enter Kubernetes.

Although containers have many benefits, they can also add to operational
complexity, especially in a production environment. A mid-sized engineering team
could easily end up with millions of containers, especially if they are using
microservices. Containers have to be deployed, scheduled, re-booted after
failures, and connected to the outside world, among many other operational
needs. Without automated container orchestration, this would need to happen
manually — and that would require an impractically large number of engineers
dedicated only to scheduling containers.

Kubernetes has emerged as the standard container orchestration platform, giving

companies the tools they need to automate tasks like scaling, scheduling, and
failure recovery.

Why Kubernetes?

The bottom line about Kubernetes is that it makes containers possible. Without a
container orchestration platform, organisations would not realistically be able to
get the benefits of containers, because the trade-offs would be too high.
Kubernetes allows organisations to automate load balancing, self-healing, storage
orchestration, configuration management, and automated rollouts and rollbacks,
including advanced deployment strategies like canary deployments.

Without this automation layer, containers wouldn’t be feasible in production.

Having some kind of container orchestration is critical to success with containers,
and the industry has quickly come to see that using Kubernetes is better than
creating a container orchestration platform from scratch or using any of the
competing technologies.

Although Kubernetes and containers are the two most important elements of the
cloud-native stack, Kubernetes does not solve all of the enterprise challenges
involved in running a containerised, cloud-native application in production. At
first, early adopters had to create their own in-house solutions to manage the
complexity that Kubernetes introduces into the system and to solve the
additional operational challenges it creates. As the ecosystem has matured,
however, different types of Kubernetes solutions have emerged. Before diving
into the solutions, let’s examine the different challenges that Kubernetes can
bring and how these impact different types of organisations.

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 Solving Kubernetes’ challenges
is not one-size-fits-all
Every organisation’s engineering and IT department has different strengths,
weaknesses and priorities. Here are some parameters that impact the specific
challenges organisations will have with Kubernetes and how they should prioritise
potential solutions:

• Size. Kubernetes becomes exponentially more complex with scale. Smaller

organisations will thus not have some of the challenges that a Fortune 500
company would.

• Technical sophistication. Some enterprises have a very high level of technical

sophistication and consider their ability to not only develop and ship
applications but also to manage infrastructure as a competitive advantage.
Other enterprises are less sophisticated and would rather focus on the
application layer.

• Industry. Different types of organisations are governed by a variety of

compliance frameworks and have different requirements around uptime,
security, and data loss.

• Budget. Some organisations are more cost-constrained than others.

• Current infrastructure. Some organisations plan to run Kubernetes on-

premises, others run Kubernetes in the cloud. Others plan to run on multiple
public clouds or across on-premises and public clouds. Kubernetes makes all of
those choices possible, but the challenges are different depending on what
type of environment Kubernetes will be running in.

The primary challenges to adopting Kubernetes

in the enterprise
Unexpectedly high costs

Considering that some organisations move to Kubernetes with the explicit

expectation that costs will go down, the fact that costs can be higher than
expected is troubling, especially for budget-conscious organisations. The good
news is that with the right approach, costs can be brought down. Here are some
cost-related pitfalls that companies should be aware of so they can make better
decisions about how to approach the transition to Kubernetes.

Kubernetes is open source, as are many of the supporting software in the cloud-
native ecosystem. Using open source software helps organisations reduce both
their OpEx and CapEx. But open source software like Kubernetes can come with
additional costs that some companies fail to consider. For example:

• Vendor lock-in. Using vanilla upstream Kubernetes isn’t feasible for all
companies—and many opt for a commercial distribution or a Kubernetes
platform tied to a cloud provider. This can create vendor lock-in, leaving
organisations at the mercy of the vendor and unable to leave if prices increase
too much.

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 • Migration costs. Moving to Kubernetes takes time. Organisations often don’t
understand the full cost of moving legacy systems to containers, both in terms
of the human resources involved and the costs related to moving data.

• Cost control best practices. Kubernetes defaults don’t include limits on

resource utilisation, and developers—especially those at the beginning of the
Kubernetes transition—don’t always understand best practices around cost
control, like setting resource limits in the configurations.

Skills gap

Kubernetes remains a relatively new technology. It’s also so complex that even
comparative experts feel like they are always learning. Kubernetes also depends
on an ever-widening ecosystem of both open source and proprietary tools, storage
solutions, networking options, and monitoring systems. There are also a variety of
Kubernetes distributions, platforms, and vendors, such that it’s not possible for
one person to be experienced in all possible Kubernetes distributions.

• Constant evolution. Kubernetes and its surrounding ecosystem continues to

evolve, often so quickly that individuals and teams can’t keep up, at least not
with the entire breadth of new best practices and new functionality in
Kubernetes and associated technology.

• Use-case specific expertise. In-house Kubernetes teams often develop narrow

experience related to the organisation’s specific use cases. This often leaves
significant gaps in teams’ understanding of how Kubernetes works, what’s
possible with Kubernetes, and how to best manage aspects like day 2
operations. In other words, even engineers who use Kubernetes regularly often
find that they don’t know what they don’t know, which in turn limits what they
can do with Kubernetes.

The persistent skills gap and need to continually invest in training can also
increase the total cost of ownership for Kubernetes.

Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud

One of the primary benefits of using containers is the ease of portability between
environments. While moving containers between environments is easy, moving a
Kubernetes workload between public clouds or between a public and private
cloud, especially if using any of the cloud provider Kubernetes distributions, can
be cumbersome. But the flexibility to operate in multiple environments is one of
the main attractions of containers and Kubernetes, and organisations need it to
be able to meet business objectives that range from controlling costs, avoiding
lock-in, and ensuring high availability. Portability between environments is also
crucial for applications to move seamlessly through the CI/CD pipeline and into
production, since the development, test, and production environments are often
in different clouds.

• Consistency across environments. Increasing the ease of multi-cloud and

hybrid cloud strategies involves ensuring as much consistency as possible across
environments. Any configurations, secrets or data information that is
environment-specific needs to be defined for the environment rather than
included in the container image or workload configuration, so that workloads
can move easily without changing anything.

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 Tool overwhelm

Kubernetes is surrounded by a huge ecosystem of tools and platforms, and there

are new additions popping up constantly. The good news is that if your
organisation needs functionality that Kubernetes does not provide out-of-the-
box, there is probably a tool built to handle that functionality. On the other hand,
organisations are faced with two major tool-related challenges:

• Selecting a tool. Simply finding the right tool involves a series of trade-offs.
How well does it integrate with the rest of the toolchain? Is it better to have the
flexibility of open source or an opinionated, more expensive proprietary tool?
How do you control tool usages throughout the enterprise and standardise on
one option? Given both the large tool ecosystem and the skills gap, tool
selection can become a bottleneck in the Kubernetes transition and slow down
the entire project.

• Managing tools. It wouldn’t be unusual for an organisation to have dozens of

different tools. This adds to the learning curve and also creates additional
complexity that has to be managed.

Security, networking, and storage

Moving to Kubernetes requires organisations to change the way they manage

security, networking, and storage. Experts in those fields will have to learn
completely new concepts as the organisation moves to Kubernetes, and
application developers who had not previously had to consider security,
networking, or storage issues will have to incorporate knowledge about all of
those domains into their workflow.

While containers and Kubernetes are not inherently less secure than monoliths,
they require a different approach to security, one that relies more on
configuration management than securing perimeters. Security teams have to
learn how to manage security in a different way, often while supporting DevOps
teams who are trying to move faster than ever.

Managing stateful applications in Kubernetes is not only possible but done in

production by many organisations, in spite of the fact that containers were
originally designed to be stateless. However, it requires expertise in managing
cloud-native storage, which behaves differently from storage in a legacy
environment.

Properly setting up load balancing can also be tricky, but is essential to ensure the
application stays available and performant.

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 Day 2 operations

Too few organisations consider the day 2 challenges at the proof-of-concept

phase, but applications running on Kubernetes, like all applications, spend most
of their lifecycle in production. During the production phase, these applications
need to be patched, upgraded, and monitored. When done manually, cluster
upgrades and security patching are complex, time-consuming, and error-prone.
One way to handle this is with Kubernetes Operators, which extend Kubernetes’
automation without changing core Kubernetes. Operators are automation tools
that take the place of a human operator to take care of a task that would
otherwise require human intervention. Kubernetes Operators can help automate
day 2 operations, but most Operators lock organisations into a specific vendor or
are not mature enough for production use in an enterprise.

The operational challenges to Kubernetes can prevent organisations from fully

realising the benefits of containers and Kubernetes. For most organisations,
security and compliance is not optional: if Kubernetes can’t be made secure
enough or fully compliant, the project will be scrapped. Some of the other
challenges, like spiralling costs and persistent skills gaps, threaten the resource
efficiency and developer agility that attracts organisations to Kubernetes in the
first place.

However, there are ways to solve these operational challenges, as well as the
other challenges mentioned above. Here are five solutions that make Kubernetes
easy to use, cost-effective, and simple to operate, as well as the pros and cons of
each approach.

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 The solutions
1. Vanilla Kubernetes

Pure, open source Kubernetes is always an option, and is likely the first type of
Kubernetes that individuals will have experience with. Vanilla Kubernetes is
extremely flexible and extensible, but it’s also lacking enterprise-grade features
around monitoring, managing state, availability, lifecycle operations and more.

Advantages Disadvantages

• Cost: There are no licensing fees for • Skills gap: Running open source
running vanilla Kubernetes Kubernetes is the most technically
challenging option. It requires a very
• Flexibility: Organisations have
deep bench of expertise to make
near-infinite control over
open source Kubernetes
configurations and extensions
enterprise-ready.
• Install anywhere: Vanilla
• Cost: Although open source
Kubernetes can be installed on-
Kubernetes has no licensing fees, the
premises or on any cloud provider,
costs associated with the hiring and
on any operating system.
retaining of Kubernetes experts can
be substantial.
• Time to market: Building tools and
platforms in-house often delays the
deployment of the first applications
in Kubernetes. It makes the overall
transition to Kubernetes longer,
stretching out the time before the
organisation starts to see returns on
the investment.
• Support: Organisations would have
to handle support internally or rely
on the Kubernetes community
for support.
• Security: Kubernetes’ out-of-the-box
configurations are not secure, and
organisations need to invest in
ensuring security if they use open
source Kubernetes.

Best for: The only organisations that should consider using pure open source
Kubernetes are highly technical ones that consider the ability to build custom
tools and platforms a key area of competitive advantage. Companies who plan to
use open source Kubernetes should have an existing team of experts who are
able to provide the support and build the tools necessary to meet business
requirements with Kubernetes.

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 2. Platform-as-a-Service

Platform-as-a-Service (PAAS) Kubernetes offerings are products offered by a

vendor that create more opinionated Kubernetes packages. The platform
generally includes pre-configured Kubernetes as well as associated tools. PAAS
solutions also generally include security, networking and storage as part of the
platform. It is usually much easier for organisations to get up-and-running with a
PAAS version of Kubernetes than with vanilla Kubernetes, and the PAAS creates
baked-in organisational consistency. This is accomplished by reducing the
configuration options available to users and by pre-selecting tools and services,
which means that PAAS solutions are considerably less flexible and difficult
to upgrade.

Advantages Disadvantages

• Short learning curve: PAAS solutions • Cost: PAAS offerings often involve
help reduce the skills gap by high license fees as well as additional
lowering the barrier to entry for fees for support subscriptions or
individuals and organisations to get additional functionality.
started with Kubernetes.
• Vendor lock-in: Organisations
• Time to market: Reducing the become locked-in to the PAAS,
learning curve means that making it challenging to change to
organisations are able to get another vendor or to vanilla
applications in production faster. Kubernetes in the future.
• Security: Using pre-configured • Portability challenges: PAAS
Kubernetes platforms improves the solutions can make it challenging to
organisation’s security posture, move between environments,
especially because it is easier to leading to additional lock-in.
ensure organisation-wide adherence
to security best practices.

Best for: PAAS Kubernetes is best for organisations that are not particularly
technically sophisticated and want to get up-and-running with Kubernetes as
quickly as possible, without investing internal resources in building tools or
expertise. If getting applications into production quickly is more important
than controlling costs or having extremely flexible infrastructure, PAAS is a
good option.

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 3. Public cloud Kubernetes distributions

Cloud-hosted Kubernetes distributions are convenient and easy. As with PAAS

solutions, organisations that use cloud-hosted Kubernetes let the cloud provider
handle the Kubernetes infrastructure. The cloud provider controls the
configurations and controls what tools can be integrated. The main difference
between cloud-hosted Kubernetes and PAAS solutions is cost and workload
portability. Cloud-hosted Kubernetes is less expensive than PAAS solutions.
However, running a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud setup is not possible with cloud-
hosted Kubernetes.

Advantages Disadvantages

• Skills gap: Cloud-hosted Kubernetes • Vendor lock-in: Using a cloud-hosted

is among the easiest ways for distribution of Kubernetes
organisations to get up-and-running essentially makes multi-cloud and
with Kubernetes. Because the cloud hybrid cloud strategies impossible. It
provider is taking care of managing also makes it difficult to impossible
Kubernetes, the amount of skill for organisations to switch cloud
needed in-house is minimal. providers in order to take advantage
of better cost structures.
• Time-to-market: Cloud-hosted
Kubernetes is also fast. It doesn’t • Cost: While cloud-hosted Kubernetes
require a complex vendor is generally less expensive than PAAS
agreement or internal investment in options, it is more expensive than
tooling set-up. running Kubernetes on-premises,
especially for long-term,
• Security: Cloud-hosted Kubernetes
compute-heavy projects.
distributions include opinionated
pre-configurations, taking out the • Inflexibility: Organisations are
risk of misconfigurations leading to limited to the tools and functionality
security vulnerabilities. The cloud supported by the particular
provider is also responsible for distribution. If they need something
managing patching and updates. outside of what’s offered,
tough luck.
• Cost: Cloud-hosted Kubernetes
distributions are often more cost-
effective than PAAS offerings, and
the pay-as-you-go model is
especially attractive for
organisations at the beginning of
the Kubernetes journey.

Best for: Cost-sensitive organisations that want to get started with Kubernetes as
quickly as possible and don’t have extensive internal Kubernetes expertise.
Cloud-hosted Kubernetes often makes sense for smaller companies. Also best for
organisations that don’t anticipate needing any unusual functionality or wanting
to integrate with tools that the Kubernetes distribution doesn’t support.

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 4. Managed Kubernetes solutions

Managed Kubernetes service providers handle the management of Kubernetes

clusters for an organisation — in their data centres, in their on-premises data
centre or in the public cloud. Managed Kubernetes services offer enterprise
support, uptime guarantees, and a hands-off experience for the customer.

Advantages Disadvantages

• Skills gap: Managed Kubernetes has • Vendor lock-in: While a managed

a short learning curve, and Kubernetes solution helps avoid
engineers can start delivering value cloud provider lock-in, organisations
with applications in Kubernetes do become locked-in to the managed
without having to become experts services provider.
in cluster administration.
• Cost: Managed Kubernetes services
• Day 2 operations: The vendor takes are more expensive than cloud-
care of day 2 operations like hosted distributions but less
upgrading and patching, simplifying expensive than PAAS offerings.
things further for the internal
• Lack of flexibility: Organisations
engineering team.
won’t be able to choose tools or
• Security: The managed services functionality outside of what’s
provider takes care of security provided by the managed service
patching, assuming much greater provider. This can reduce overwhelm
responsibility for security than related to selecting tools, but can
cloud providers do in the cloud- also mean organisations might not
hosted distribution model. be able to get all the functionality
they need.
• Multi-cloud / hybrid cloud: Using
a managed service provider is the
easiest way to get an opinionated
Kubernetes platform that reduces
the skills gap while also offering
organisations the ability to move
between public clouds and
private clouds.

Best for: Organisations at the beginning of their Kubernetes journey that plan
to follow a multi-cloud and/or hybrid cloud approach. Managed Kubernetes
services are best for organisations that don’t have extensive in-house
Kubernetes expertise and want to focus on delivering applications instead of
managing infrastructure.

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 5. Enterprise Kubernetes platforms

Enterprise Kubernetes platforms package upstream-compliant Kubernetes with

tools that help organisations manage the entire application lifecycle, and
generally focus on providing one central platform to control multiple clusters and
multiple environments. These platforms make it easier for centralised teams to
control configurations and access management for the entire organisation.
Enterprise Kubernetes platforms offer dramatically more flexibility than any
option other than open source Kubernetes.

Enterprise Kubernetes platforms fall into two general categories: developer-

focused and operations-focused. The dev-focused platforms prioritise ease-of-
use for developers while the ops-focused platforms generally provide more
advanced operational controls, often focused on ensuring the reliability and
availability enterprises need.

Advantages Disadvantages

• Tooling: Enterprise Kubernetes • Skills gap: Increased flexibility and

platforms come with a complete suite control mean that organisations
of tools so that organisations don’t need to have a higher level of
need to spend time selecting them. At Kubernetes expertise to
the same time, it’s easier to integrate successfully use enterprise
with new tools if needed than with Kubernetes platforms. While only
other options. a small, central team has to learn
Kubernetes inside and out,
• Day 2: Enterprise Kubernetes platforms
organisations do need at least
focus on managing the entire
some internal expertise.
application lifecycle, and day 2
management tools are often one of the • Cost: Depending on the vendor,
primary selling points. the licencing fees and support
contracts can be substantial,
• Multi-cloud / hybrid cloud: The single,
especially for smaller companies
centralised control plane for cluster
and/or smaller use cases.
management makes it possible for
organisations to pursue a multi-cloud • Security: Security is generally the
or hybrid cloud approach, without user’s responsibility in enterprise
dramatically increasing complexity and Kubernetes platforms.
while still ensuring adherence to Organisations’ ability to manage
organisational governance policies on security effectively depends
all environments. Enterprise platforms largely on how straightforward the
also make workloads easy to move vendor’s security functionality is.
between environments.
• Scale: Enterprise Kubernetes platforms
make the most sense for large
companies managing multiple
environments and hundreds of clusters.
• Workload portability: Enterprise
Kubernetes platforms often make it
easier to move workloads between
environments.

Best for: Large companies with complex, multi-environment deployments and

enough technical expertise to take advantage of the flexibility that enterprises
Kubernetes platforms offer. This is often the best option for organisations that
are further along on their Kubernetes journey.
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What does each solution address? The table below summarises the strengths of each solution on a scale with
5/5 being the highest rating.

Vanilla Platform Public cloud Managed Enterprise

Kubernetes as a Service Kubernetes Kubernetes Kubernetes
distributions solutions platforms

Cost

Bridging the skills gap

Hybrid / Multi-cloud

Tool overwhelm

Security / networking / storage

Day 2 operations

Kubernetes with Canonical

Ubuntu is the operating system of choice for all major cloud-hosted Kubernetes
distributions as well as for enterprises running Kubernetes on-premises.
Canonical’s range of support offerings helps teams get over the skills gap and get
value out of Kubernetes sooner. In addition to support options, Canonical offers
organisations several ways to overcome challenges to Kubernetes adoption.

With managed Kubernetes clusters, Canonical will set up your Kubernetes clusters
and operate them until you’re ready to take over operational control. This option
helps organisations get started very quickly with Kubernetes while building
internal expertise. Clusters can be set up on-premises or in any public cloud, and
Canonical will handle updates, monitoring and other Day 2 operations until the
team is confident handling those things in-house.

Charmed Kubernetes is an enterprise Kubernetes platform based on pure

upstream Kubernetes. Charmed Kubernetes combines the flexibility of open
source Kubernetes with extensive customisation capabilities, fine-grained service
placement and centralised operational control. In addition to the advantages
most enterprise Kubernetes platforms have in common, here’s what users get
with Charmed Kubernetes:

• Automatic security updates managed by Canonical, reducing the amount of

security investment needed.

• A robust, extensible ecosystem of tools to manage storage, networking and CI/CD

• Lifecycle automation through model-driven Kubernetes operators

• Seamless workload portability between environments and substrates

Charmed Kubernetes provides developers with ‘Containers as a Service,’ allowing

them to move quickly and scale easily. At the same time, operators are able to
maintain central control and ensure operational requirements and security
policies are met.

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 MicroK8s is a lightweight Kubernetes that nonetheless provides all the
functionality of pure upstream Kubernetes while packaging the most popular
Kubernetes add-ons. MicroK8s is especially appropriate for use-cases where
resources are limited, such as on a workstation, IoT device or at the edge.
MicroK8s provides the same security support, workload portability and lifecycle
automation as Charmed Kubernetes, while further simplifying the installation and
configuration process to get users up-and-running as quickly as possible.

Conclusion
As organisations rush to adopt Kubernetes, they can’t ignore the real business
requirements around security, availability, and disaster recovery. Every
organisation has to decide what is the right balance between ease of use, time-
to-market, and flexibility and whether they’d rather pay more for internal
Kubernetes’ experts time or more in licencing fees. The bottom line is that if
enterprises want to use Kubernetes for production workloads, especially mission-
critical workloads, they can’t use vanilla, open source Kubernetes out-of-the-box.
But the right way to get enterprise-grade Kubernetes depends on the priorities
and capabilities of each company.

Further reading:

• A decision maker’s guide to Kubernetes deployment in your data centre

• Streamlining Kubernetes from cloud to edge
• An intro to MicroK8s

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