Karmada vs Kubean

Karmada manages cloud-native applications across multiple Kubernetes clusters and clouds without requiring changes to the applications. It supports public and private cloud, on-premises, edge, and self-built environments that meet Kubernetes specifications. Cluster connections can use Push mode through a Kubernetes API server or Pull mode through an in-cluster agent. Scheduling policies cover cluster affinity, taints and tolerations, topology spread, and replicated or divided placement. OverridePolicy allows per-cluster changes to images, arguments, commands, and plain-text configuration. Karmada can move replicas after a cluster failure, including migration that avoids service replicas dropping to zero. Through karmada-apiserver, teams can create, update, delete, and query resources across member clusters. Its components export Prometheus metrics; integrations described include Submariner networking and ErieCanal service governance. Installation options include CLI tools, Helm, an operator, binaries, or source. The CLI initialization requires escalated privileges to store shared configuration under /etc/karmada by default. Karmada is open source and free, with customer-managed control plane; it manages clusters but does not provision them.

Kubean is an open-source toolchain for managing Kubernetes cluster lifecycles. It runs on an existing Kubernetes cluster and uses Kubespray and other lifecycle engines. A declarative API and Kubernetes resources support installation, uninstallation, upgrades and scaling, including worker-node and control-plane operations. The documented installation method is a Helm chart, requiring an existing standard or cloud-provider Kubernetes cluster and Helm. Deployments can use SSH, with an SSH private key stored in a Kubernetes Secret referenced by a Cluster resource. Kubean supports offline deployment and publishes operating-system packages, images and binaries with releases. Operations can run a playbook or shell command, with optional pre-operation and post-operation hooks. Listed delivery architectures include AMD, ARM and Kunpeng with Kylin. Supported environments include bare metal, virtual machines and cloud environments, with customer-managed control planes. Offline packages cover CentOS, Red Hat, Kylin and Ubuntu; local ISO sources are currently limited to CentOS.