Honestly my experience has been that managed k8s is often more complicated from a developer perspective than just k8s - sure, you don't have to deal with setting it up, but you have to figure out how all the 'management' and provider-specific features work, and they often seem pretty clumsily integrated.

And in many cases features that would help your use case aren't enabled on that platform, or are in a release that's still a year or two from being supported on that platform... I'm looking at you, EKS.

I really wish cloud providers would offer a managed Docker Swarm service - it's so much simpler than k8s, but not having to manage the underlying machines would be great.

I might be remembering wrongly, but I think Azure actually used to offer multiple managed orchestration platforms, including DCOS and Swarm, before they went all-in on k8s.

Oh yes. Managed kubernetes is full of various issues. Some major cloud providers sell very poor managed kubernetes.

If someone knows about a reliable managed kubernetes, please let me know.

Can you elaborate on the cloud providers selling poorly managed k8s - are they all problematic? I have no experience with cloud provided k8s.

Not the OP but yes if cost is a factor. As far as I know no managed K8S offerings are cheap.

- DigitalOcean offers free clusters.

- Azure (still?) offers free clusters.

- GCP offers one free single-zone cluster.

If you need more than DO can offer in terms of compute instances, you can probably afford GKE/EKS, which is around 75$/month.

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Running highly-available control plane (K8s masters & etcd) by yourself is NOT cheaper than using EKS.

To achive high availability, EKS runs 3 masters and 3 etcd instances, in different availability zones. Provisioning 3 t3.medium instances (4 GB of memory and 2 CPUs) would cost the same as a completely managed EKS.

Not to mention the manual work you need to setup, maintain and upgrade such instances.