Kubernetes has emerged as the go-to orchestration tool for managing containerized applications. According to Portworx’s 2024 Voice of Kubernetes Experts report, 58% of organizations are planning to move some of their virtual machine (VM) workloads to Kubernetes. Of this group, 65% of organizations are urgently moving their VM workloads to Kubernetes, and 80% plan to be completely using Kubernetes in the next five years.
However, when adopting Kubernetes, organizations face a critical decision: Should they build their own Kubernetes platform in house, or should they invest in a third-party Kubernetes native solution?
Let’s explore the pros and cons of both approaches to help you make an informed choice that best suits your organization’s needs.
Building a Kubernetes Platform in House
Building a Kubernetes platform from scratch can be tempting, especially if your team has the necessary technical expertise and needs control over how the platform is configured. Let’s break down the pros and cons of building an in-house Kubernetes solution.
Pros of Building a Kubernetes Platform
Here are some advantages of building a Kubernetes platform within your organization.
Having Full Customization and Control
Building your Kubernetes platform allows you to tailor the environment to your specific use cases and business requirements. This means you can control every aspect — from custom integrations to fine-tuned configurations — allowing maximum flexibility to fit your development processes and workflows.
Adapting to Unique Business Needs
If your organization has specialized infrastructure needs, you may find that no off-the-shelf solution is an exact match. For example, if you need to deploy Hyperledger Fabric in Kubernetes, you might not find a lot of platforms catering to this use case. By building in house, you can align your Kubernetes platform with your unique workloads, data handling requirements and security policies.
Avoiding Vendor Lock-In
Relying on third-party solutions can lead to vendor lock-in, especially if a platform becomes a key part of your CI/CD pipeline. By managing your own Kubernetes platform, you retain independence and avoid potential challenges when switching vendors down the road. Additionally, if your chosen platform vendor doesn’t have a lot of flexibility and support, it might be difficult to switch to a different one.
Developing Skills and Expertise
For organizations with dedicated DevOps and development teams, building a Kubernetes platform offers a great opportunity to cultivate deep expertise in Kubernetes, cloud native tooling and automation. This knowledge can benefit other areas of infrastructure and platform management, provided you can invest dedicated staff time to build the platform.
Cons of Building a Kubernetes Platform
Here are a few disadvantages you might experience in building your own Kubernetes platform.
Investing Staff Time and Diverting Resources
Building a Kubernetes platform is far from a plug-and-play solution. It requires time, effort and expertise across various domains, including security, monitoring, logging, scaling and networking. One of the biggest challenges of building an in-house platform is you must divert resources from projects designed to build a competitive advantage over competitors. The time your team spends building and maintaining the platform could be invested in other core business activities.
Maintaining the Platform
Managing a Kubernetes platform is not a one-time effort. The team must stay up to date with new releases, security patches and emerging best practices. Ongoing maintenance includes troubleshooting, scaling and ensuring the platform remains resilient and secure. Kubernetes is one of the most active CNCF projects, with three releases each year, and every release brings new enhancements, deprecations and features. Keeping your platform compatible with it is another big overhead.
Delaying Time to Market
While building a platform allows customization, it may delay its time to completion. Developing a robust platform that includes all necessary integrations and automation could take months or even years, which could affect how quickly your teams can deliver applications to production.
Hiring Talent
Kubernetes expertise is in high demand, so finding and retaining skilled professionals to manage your custom-built platform can be challenging. If key team members leave the organization, knowledge gaps may cause operational issues, especially during critical incidents.
Funding High Startup Costs
Building a platform requires the right expertise: people who understand the Kubernetes infrastructure and can build on it. Initially, it can cost a lot of time and money to hire the right talent and dedicate them to work on the Kubernetes platform. There may also be high initial costs to maintain the platform, as well as to make sure it is compatible with the latest Kubernetes versions, features, and deprecations and caters to the organization’s requirements.
Buying a Kubernetes Platform
Purchasing a managed Kubernetes platform can provide a streamlined, out-of-the-box solution with many built-in features for container orchestration, CI/CD, monitoring and more. Here’s a closer look at the pros and cons of buying a Kubernetes platform.
Pros of Buying a Kubernetes Platform
Here are some advantages of buying a Kubernetes platform.
Faster Time to Market
Buying a platform enables a quick spin-up of the infrastructure and platform and helps ensure teams can get started as quickly as possible. This allows your team to focus on developing and deploying applications rather than spending time architecting and maintaining the underlying platform.
Lower Operational Overhead
Managed platforms handle much of the heavy lifting associated with Kubernetes management, such as autoscaling; DecSecOps practices, policies and governance; setting up access management; and monitoring. Offloading these tasks to a vendor allows your team to focus on business-critical tasks rather than maintaining infrastructure.
Better DevEx
Managed Kubernetes platform vendors have developed expertise in improving the developer experience and regularly integrate their learnings into their products. Buying a platform allows you to take advantage of the vendor’s DevEx knowledge to improve developer experience and collaboration among your teams.
Built-In Best Practices
Managed platforms incorporate industry best practices by default, which helps ensure that your Kubernetes environment is set up optimally for security, scalability and performance. For example, Devtron has CI/CD pipelines, GitOps workflows and multicluster management baked in.
Support and Documentation
Most managed platforms provide comprehensive support and documentation, which can be a significant advantage. They also conduct training sessions to make sure users benefit from support and robust documentation. This can make it easier to troubleshoot issues or onboard new team members.
Cost Efficiency
Buying a Kubernetes platform can be more cost-effective than building one, particularly for smaller organizations. This can also be true for larger organizations that lack the staffing and expertise to manage a large-scale Kubernetes infrastructure.
Cons of Buying a Kubernetes Platform
Buying a Kubernetes platform also has some disadvantages. Here are some of them.
Limited Customization
While third-party platforms offer a wide array of features, they may not allow the same level of customization as a homegrown solution. Some organizations may find that unique use cases are not fully addressed by a prebuilt solution. If the platform and the team are flexible enough to enable building custom options, it can be a huge advantage. But most platforms don’t offer this kind of flexibility.
Potential Vendor Lock-In
Relying on a managed Kubernetes platform means you are dependent on the vendor’s roadmap, pricing structure and future availability. This might make things harder if you plan to switch things or re-engineer your architecture.
Subscription Costs
The cost of a subscription or license for a managed Kubernetes platform could increase over time as your infrastructure scales. For organizations with significant workloads, this could lead to higher operational expenses compared to an in-house solution, especially if you can manage scaling internally.
Tips for Buying a Kubernetes Platform
You can mitigate some of these disadvantages with careful research into potential platforms.
Choose a Customizable Platform
Choose a platform that is extendable, so as you grow and your requirements change over time, the platform can adapt to your requirements and you are not left fighting the platform.
Build on Industry Standards
No product is without vendor lock-in risk, and that includes home-grown platforms. But using a platform built on industry standards and an open source ethos gives you more flexibility and options to choose from compared to a DIY platform.
Choose the Right Option: Build vs. Buy
Who Should Build?
Organizations may benefit from building their own Kubernetes platform when they have:
Specialized industry requirements: Businesses that require highly specialized Kubernetes workflows that an off-the-shelf Kubernetes platform can’t accommodate. For example, financial trading firms that need custom integrations with market data feeds and proprietary risk management systems
Technical capabilities: Building and maintaining an in-house Kubernetes platform requires strong in-house expertise in:
- Kubernetes and other cloud-native tools.
- Multiple languages and frameworks.
- Cloud infrastructure management.
- Security implementation and governance.
Who Should Buy?
Buying a Kubernetes platform offered as a self-service solution might be the ideal choice for organizations with the following characteristics:
Require rapid time to value: Organizations seeking to quickly enable their development teams with a functional platform can benefit from the faster time to value offered by prebuilt Kubernetes platforms. These platforms typically require minimal setup and configuration, allowing developers to get up and running quickly and minimizing disruption to existing workflows.
Limited in-house development resources: Organizations with limited in-house development resources or that lack the expertise required to build and maintain a complex platform can benefit from leveraging the expertise of established vendors. This also frees up internal teams to focus on core development activities while ensuring access to a robust and feature-rich platform.
Summarizing the Pros and Cons
This summary of the pros and cons should help you weigh your options.
- Control
- Build: Complete control over security and data management.
- Buy: Some level of control, depending on the vendor’s policies.
- Customization
- Build: Highly customizable according to organizational needs but requires time and effort.
- Buy: Limited options. Some vendors might offer customizations according to requirements.
- Effort and investments
- Build: Requires a lot of effort and heavy investments in teams.
- Buy: Comparatively requires less effort and investment.
- Talent scarcity
- Build: Difficult to find and retain skilled developers to build and maintain the platform.
- Buy: Vendor expertise eliminates the requirement for specialized talent.
- Scalability
- Build: Scalability completely depends on internal resources and infrastructure.
- Buy: Easy scalability that is managed by the vendor.
- Security
- Build: Complete responsibility for security is on internal teams.
- Buy: Evaluate for organizational compliance and security considerations.
- Maintenance overhead
- Build: Requires ongoing maintenance efforts by internal teams to ensure security patches and timely upgrades.
- Buy: The vendor performs all the heavy lifting.
Which Is Right for You?
The decision to build or buy a Kubernetes platform depends largely on your organization’s needs, budget and expertise.
If your company has specialized requirements and a team capable of managing the complexities of Kubernetes, building in house may give you the customization and control you desire. However, for most organizations, especially those looking for faster deployment times and reduced operational complexity, buying a customizable solution like Devtron, which is built in the open with an open core philosophy using industry standards, can offer the best of both worlds.
Ultimately, the question boils down to your long-term business goals: Do you want full control at the cost of increased management, or are you looking to offload platform maintenance to a trusted vendor, freeing your team to focus on innovation? Whichever path you choose, Kubernetes is here to stay — and choosing the right platform can make all the difference in driving success for your cloud native applications.
The post Build vs. Buy: Compare Your Kubernetes Platform Options appeared first on The New Stack.
Weigh the pros and cons of building a Kubernetes platform verses buying a prebuilt vendor solution, and then decide which is best for your business.