Kubernetes has dramatically shifted the trade-offs of on-prem versus SaaS deployments. Thanks to the rich abstractions Kubernetes provides, deploying software on-premises can be significantly easier than it used to be. Because Kubernetes has achieved such high market penetration (and still growing), it is now a viable target environment for many software products. Nevertheless, Kubernetes requires external tools to be production ready, especially on an on-prem deployment.
The purpose of this article is to list tools that everyone should be aware of when it’s time to move an on-prem Kubernetes cluster to production, and by on-prem, we mean not in a cloud environment. In the cloud, it is obviously better to rely on cloud services offered by the provider.