Kubernetes Deployment Options for On-Prem Clusters
Lincoln Bryant, Robert W. Gardner, Fengping Hu, David Jordan, Ryan P., Taylor

TL;DR
This paper compares three popular on-premises Kubernetes deployment strategies—Kubeadm with Kubespray, OpenShift/OKD, and Rancher with K3S/RKE2—to guide system administrators in choosing suitable options.
Contribution
It provides a comparative analysis of deployment methods for on-premises Kubernetes clusters, highlighting their differences and suitability for various scenarios.
Findings
Kubeadm with Kubespray offers flexibility but requires more manual configuration.
OpenShift/OKD provides enterprise features with integrated management.
Rancher with K3S/RKE2 is lightweight and easy to deploy.
Abstract
Over the last decade, the Kubernetes container orchestration platform has become essential to many scientific workflows. Despite its popularity, deploying a production-ready Kubernetes cluster on-premises can be challenging for system administrators. Many of the proprietary integrations that application developers take for granted in commercial cloud environments must be replaced with alternatives when deployed locally. This article will compare three popular deployment strategies for sites deploying Kubernetes on-premise: Kubeadm with Kubespray, OpenShift / OKD and Rancher via K3S/RKE2.
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Taxonomy
TopicsUniversity-Industry-Government Innovation Models · Distributed systems and fault tolerance · Business Strategy and Innovation
