Kubernetes on your hardware — without running control planes yourself.
Keep your bare metal infrastructure. Keep your data local. Get a managed Kubernetes experience without the control plane operations burden.
The challenge
On-prem and bare metal Kubernetes gives you control—but comes with operational complexity:
On-prem clusters drift from intended state over time
etcd upgrades and maintenance are risky without expertise
Control plane operations require specialized knowledge
Consistency across multiple on-prem sites is difficult
K8S Engine approach
K8S Engine manages the control plane. You attach bare metal nodes.
Your hardware stays in your datacenter. Your data stays where you need it.
What you get
Consistent lifecycle management
Same upgrade process, maintenance windows, and operational model regardless of hardware location.
Governance and compliance
Centralized audit logs, access controls, and security policies across all bare metal clusters.
Reliability without the expertise
etcd management, backups, and control plane SRE handled by K8S Engine.
Example deployment pattern
K8S Engine manages the control plane in our infrastructure
You install the node agent on your bare metal servers
Nodes connect outbound to the control plane (no inbound firewall rules)
Use labels and taints to organize workloads across sites
Optional: Define Node Pools for consistent provisioning
Operational Ownership
K8S Engine
Control plane, etcd, upgrades, backups, scaling logic
You
Nodes, networking, workloads, infrastructure costs
Ideal for
- Teams with existing datacenter hardware investments
- Organizations with data residency requirements
- Workloads that need predictable performance (no noisy neighbors)
- Cost optimization for steady-state compute