Managed Kubernetes

Managed Kubernetes is a hosted version of the Kubernetes container orchestrator where the cloud provider runs and maintains the hard part — the control plane — while you deploy your workloads onto worker nodes. The big offerings are Amazon EKS, Google GKE, and Azure AKS. Why it matters: Kubernetes gives you a portable, provider-agnostic way to run containers with built-in autoscaling, self-healing, rolling deployments, and service discovery — but running the control plane yourself is a full-time job. Managed Kubernetes removes that burden while keeping the portability. Practical note: Kubernetes is powerful and genuinely complex; it earns its keep when you have many services, need fine-grained scaling, or want to avoid provider lock-in. For a single app or a small team, a platform as a service or serverless is usually faster to ship and cheaper to operate. Adopt Kubernetes when your architecture, not your résumé, actually demands it.