Published November 4, 2026
Kubernetes is open-source software that runs containerized applications across a group of servers, called a cluster. Its control plane schedules the containers, restarts them when they fail and scales them with demand. A Kubernetes platform packages Kubernetes with the installation, upgrades, security and management tools an organization needs to run it in production.
Where the market stands
The Kubernetes project releases a new minor version about every four months. Kubernetes 1.37 shipped on August 26, 2026. The project maintains release branches for the three most recent minor releases, and each gets about one year of patch support. The project's end-of-life date for Kubernetes 1.34 is October 27, 2026.
The project retired Ingress NGINX, a controller that routes outside traffic into clusters, in March 2026. It gets no further releases, bug fixes or security updates. Existing deployments keep working. The project recommends migrating to an alternative and names Gateway API as the modern replacement for Ingress. Ingress2Gateway 1.0, released on March 20, 2026, translates Ingress resources and over 30 common Ingress NGINX annotations to Gateway API.
AWS and Microsoft have added modes that manage worker nodes as well as the control plane. Amazon EKS Auto Mode launched on December 1, 2024. It chooses, scales, patches and upgrades the servers that run workloads. Microsoft made AKS Automatic generally available on September 16, 2025, and its documentation calls it the recommended default for most production workloads.
IREN announced on August 4, 2026 that it had completed its acquisition of Mirantis. The consideration was about 12.6 million IREN shares plus about $40 million in cash, restricted stock units and other consideration. IREN says Mirantis's open-source k0rdent AI platform will continue to be developed and supported.
Three kinds of platform
- Managed cloud services. Amazon EKS, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) run the control plane for you and bill the compute underneath. EKS Hybrid Nodes lets on-premises and edge servers act as nodes in an EKS cluster.
- Distributions you run. Red Hat OpenShift editions include OpenShift Kubernetes Engine, OpenShift Container Platform and OpenShift Platform Plus, which adds management across multiple clusters and further security and automation. SUSE Rancher Prime provisions clusters on EKS, AKS and GKE, installs Kubernetes on servers, and imports existing clusters from any provider. Broadcom includes vSphere Kubernetes Service in both VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF).
- Fleet and edge. Spectro Cloud designed Palette Edge for sites with one or more small devices. It uses an immutable operating system with rolling upgrades and scales from tens to thousands of locations. K3s is a fully compliant Kubernetes distribution in a binary under 100 MB. Its documentation lists edge and IoT among its uses.
The CNCF certifies conformance, which means a product supports the required Kubernetes APIs. It lists over 90 Certified Kubernetes offerings. Check load balancer, storage and identity integrations separately.
What the managed services cost
Compute is billed on top of every fee below. A $0.10 hourly fee comes to about $73 a month per cluster. The fee rises sixfold when a cluster stays on an old version.
- Amazon EKS. $0.10 per cluster per hour in standard support and $0.60 in extended support. Auto Mode adds a charge on top of each EC2 instance it manages, billed per second. Hybrid Nodes cost from $0.020 per vCPU per hour, falling with volume.
- GKE. $0.10 per cluster per hour in every mode. A monthly credit of $74.40 per billing account covers one Autopilot or zonal cluster. Autopilot bills general-purpose workloads on the CPU, memory and ephemeral storage their pods request. Extended support adds $0.50 per cluster per hour, for $0.60 in total. Fleet management, Config Management and Policy Controller come at no extra cost.
- AKS. The Free tier has no cluster management fee and no financially backed SLA. Microsoft's price list sets the Standard tier at $0.10 an hour and the Premium tier, which adds Long Term Support to the Standard SLA, at $0.60 an hour. The AKS Automatic hosted control plane is $0.16 an hour, plus a charge on each virtual machine it launches and manages.
What the distributions cost
- Red Hat OpenShift. Self-managed subscriptions count core pairs, defined as 2 physical cores or 4 vCPUs, across the cluster, or bare-metal nodes whatever their sockets or cores. Control plane and infrastructure nodes are included unless they run user applications. Platform Plus is sold for x86 clusters only. Red Hat's subscription guide lists no prices.
- SUSE Rancher Prime. SUSE's shop sells it per server of 1 to 2 sockets and up to 64 cores, or per 2 cores or 4 vCPUs. Each comes in Standard or Priority support, on 1-, 3- or 5-year terms. Prices show only after login.
- vSphere Kubernetes Service. It comes with VCF and VVF, which are licensed per core with a minimum of 16 cores per processor. Broadcom's terms say its components have a shorter support life cycle than the rest of the VCF software.
How long each version is supported
- EKS. 14 months of standard support, then 12 months of extended support. After that, EKS upgrades the control plane on its own. Managed node groups and self-managed nodes stay on the old version until you update them.
- GKE. At least 14 months of standard support and up to 24 months in total on the Extended channel. Near the end of extended support, GKE begins upgrading clusters to the next minor version, except clusters that use deprecated features or APIs.
- AKS. One year of community support, then one more year of Long Term Support on the Premium tier. From June 1, 2027, AKS will upgrade any cluster left on an unsupported version once a 60-day grace period ends. These upgrades ignore maintenance windows and can override pod disruption budgets.
- OpenShift. Each minor release is supported until 18 months after general availability. Even-numbered releases are Extended Update Support releases. With add-on terms, a customer can stay on one of them for 48 months in total.
Plan upgrades as a standing schedule, not a project. A fleet that falls behind pays the extended rate on every cluster, then gets upgraded on the provider's timetable.
Virtual machines on Kubernetes
VMware announced its move from perpetual licenses to subscriptions on December 11, 2023. Kubernetes platforms that run virtual machines are one alternative to a VMware renewal.
KubeVirt, a CNCF incubating project since April 19, 2022, adds an API and runtime for virtual machines to Kubernetes. Harvester, which Rancher's documentation lists as SUSE Virtualization, is open-source hyperconverged software built on Kubernetes, KubeVirt and the Longhorn storage system. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization runs virtual machines alongside containers. Red Hat's OpenShift Virtualization Engine is subscribed only per bare-metal node, whatever the number of sockets or cores, and covers unlimited virtual machines on that host. It cannot run application containers. Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests need a separate subscription.
Prove live migration, storage, backup and day-to-day operations on a pilot before moving production virtual machines.
Questions to settle first
Settle these before choosing a platform.
- How many clusters will you run in three years, and where: one cloud, several, your own data centers or edge sites?
- Who upgrades each cluster every four months, and what does a fleet cost if it falls into extended support?
- Which clusters still route traffic through Ingress NGINX, and when will they move to Gateway API or another controller?
- Which load balancer, storage and identity integrations would have to be rebuilt to move a workload to another provider?
- Will the platform also run virtual machines, and what must the pilot prove before it does?