Exoscale Scalable Kubernetes Service vs MicroK8s

Exoscale Scalable Kubernetes Service (SKS) is a managed Kubernetes service for deploying, scaling and hosting containerized applications in Europe. It is available through web and APIs, with a free Starter Cluster and a Pro Cluster billed hourly; the Pro price is not shown as a numeric amount. Exoscale operates the control plane and provides upgrades, and says fully managed clusters can start in less than one minute. Starter includes a managed control plane, CLI, API, Terraform integration and automatic control-plane patch upgrades. Pro adds a highly available control plane, etcd backups, a 99.95% SLA and Karpenter autoscaling. Network Load Balancers handle ingress, while the CSI driver attaches block or object storage for stateful workloads. Authentication, network policies, role-based access and Kubernetes Audit provide control and visibility. Every release passes CNCF conformance tests. SKS is vanilla Kubernetes, so monitoring, GitOps and security tools are not installed by default. Customers receive ticket support, with paid plans offering faster responses and additional coverage.

MicroK8s is a lightweight Kubernetes distribution that can run on a single node or scale to a high-availability production cluster. It is positioned for developer workstations, production, public clouds, edge deployments, IoT and embedded software-vendor platforms. The self-hosted distribution supports Linux, macOS and Windows, and packages upstream Kubernetes services in a minimal CNCF-certified distribution. Three or more nodes enable Dqlite-backed high availability and automatic recovery after a node failure. Strict confinement restricts workloads to explicitly granted files, system resources and hardware. Cluster API can automate cluster creation and lifecycle management through YAML manifests, including rolling HA upgrades. GPU workloads can use the NVIDIA GPU Operator, including NVIDIA Multi-Instance GPU. Official and community addons provide services such as DNS, certificate management, Prometheus, Istio and dashboards. Security updates apply automatically by default, with rollback on failure, and Kubernetes upgrades can be done with one command. MicroK8s has no license fees. Ubuntu Pro subscriptions are also listed, including $25 a year for a workstation subscription and $500 a year for a server subscription with unlimited VMs.