Creating a bare-metal cluster from scratch

In the previous section, we looked at running Kubernetes on cloud providers. This is the dominant deployment story for Kubernetes, but there are strong use cases for running Kubernetes on bare metal. I don't focus here on hosted versus on-premises; this is yet another dimension. If you already manage a lot of servers on-premises, you are in the best position to decide.

Use cases for bare metal

Bare-metal clusters are a beast especially if you manage them yourself. There are companies that provide commercial support for bare-metal Kubernetes clusters, such as Platform 9, but the offerings are not mature yet. A solid open-source option is Kubespray, which can deploy industrial-strength Kubernetes clusters on bare metal, AWS, GCE, Azure, and OpenStack.

Here are some use cases where it makes sense:

• Budget concerns: If you already manage large-scale bare clusters, it may be much cheaper to run Kubernetes clusters on your physical infrastructure
• Low network...