Control Plane vs Mirantis Kubernetes Engine

Control Plane virtualizes cloud infrastructure into an AI-native cloud for deploying workloads across infrastructure selected by the customer. It combines bare metal, Kubernetes, and regions from AWS, GCP, Azure, and OCI. Supported workloads include containers, virtual machines, and ephemeral isolated sandboxes. Universal Cloud Identity provides credential-free service access across clouds without embedding credentials in workloads. Networking includes a service mesh, per-workload firewalls, and outbound-only Cloud Wormhole tunnels to private networks. The platform lists infrastructure provisioning, governance policies, infrastructure as code, role-based access control, audit logs, and Kubernetes management. Integrations include Terraform, Pulumi, Datadog, Logz.io, and Coralogix. Capacity AI is described as right-sizing resources; the company says most customers cut cloud bills by 30–50%. Usage pricing is billed monthly without contracts, minimums, or lock-ins. CPU is $0.06205654 per millicore-month, memory $0.00706330 per megabyte-month, and SSD $0.21224989 per GB-month.

Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (MKE 4) is a self-hosted enterprise Kubernetes platform built on the open-source k0s distribution. It supports deployment across public and private clouds, multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments, and bare-metal infrastructure. Teams manage cluster lifecycle with the mkectl command-line tool and a declarative mke4.yaml configuration file; standardized APIs and GitOps-based lifecycle management are also listed. A cluster combines k0s, a container network interface, the MKE control plane, system services, and user services. Calico is installed by default, with other network interface options supported. The web dashboard manages Kubernetes resources in an MKE-managed cluster. Backup and restore are supported, and the CLI upgrade process includes automated backups. Authentication through Dex supports OIDC, SAML, and LDAP, but not MFA. MKE 4 requires x86_64 and Linux manager/control-plane nodes; supported operating systems include specified Ubuntu, RHEL, and Rocky Linux versions, plus Windows Server worker nodes. A valid license is required, and a trial license is available on request. Mirantis offers 24/7 proactive support or managed services.