[terrywang]

AWS is lagging behind on managed K8s on-prem for air-gapped environments, consider Google had GKE on-prem (now a part of Anthos) long ago, and Azure offered AKS on Azure Stack HCI. Finally AWS caught up, feature parity between the big 3.

Adoption will be interesting to see.

I've worked on gravitational (gravity / telekube) flavoured K8s distribution designed for on-prem data centre deployment models for the past few years. Those customers will eventually move to 1. managed K8s (good on them) or 2. continue to self-host K8s to satisfy their building one's own PaaS goal lol (in that case, it's better be managed K8s' on-prem variant from GKE/AKS/EKS). For the same K8s solution's other model - BYO K8s, I see rapid adoption of AKS (vs GKE, EKS is the dominate from beginning as it was the first supported).

On gravitational: Recently I heard gravitational has shifted focus (and rebranded) to teleport (secure cloud access gateway - used to be a part of gravity), around their Series B funding round, after all, investors are looking for a business model that can bring them profit (and exit). On the other hand, `gravity` - `pull the stack from cloud` - where the name came from - which addresses specify niche market does not seem to have generated much revenue over the last couple of years.

[bogomipz]

>"I've worked on gravitational (gravity / telekube) flavoured K8s distribution designed for on-prem data centre deployment models for the past few years."

This sounds interesting. Can you say what K8S distro this is?

[terrywang]

Telekube (renamed to gravity by Gravitational - which has again rebranded to Teleport ;-)

Open source edition: https://github.com/gravitational/gravity

Note: We have been using its 5.x branch (tracking K8s 1.13.x) for a long time. That's why later on BYO K8s model was introduced ;-)

[bogomipz]

Thanks. Oh that is confusing. I think I actually became more confused after I read the announcement of their name change :)

Wasn't Teleport the original name for the product?

I'd be curious to hear what's your plan going forward now that gravity is no longer under active development.

[terrywang]

The existing appliance model will continue to be maintained (until upstream EOL it - or when the support agreement ends).

In the meantime, to address the same requirements from customers who wants some control (K8s stack, VMs, networking and storage are theirs), managed K8s' on-prem distribution may be the answer, I'll be exploring EKS Anywhere see how it works and see if it's a viable option to replace the appliance model moving forward.