That was the shared vision that drove the creation of Rackspace Spot by Rackspace and Platform9. In this article, we like to share the journey of our two unique teams in the cloud infrastructure industry, and how our learnings and insights led to the creation of the industry’s best Managed Kubernetes offering.
Background
Platform9 was an early entrant in the Managed Kubernetes space. We launched Managed Kubernetes in 2017, which allowed customers anywhere to easily deploy, manage and operate Kubernetes clusters with our SaaS control plane. At that time, Google’s GKE - the original Managed Kubernetes - was the only comparable solution in the market. During DockerCon 2016 in Seattle, when Brandon Burns, one of the creators of Kubernetes, stopped by and we exchanged notes on how Platform9 and GKE used a similar architecture and operating model.
Fast forward to 2023. Platform9 was successful with large enterprise deployments, but we had struggled to gain wide adoption for Managed Kubernetes offering; with increasing adoption of the big 3 cloud vendors, each of whom had their own Managed Kubernetes offerings: EKS, GKE and AKS. At the same time, our partnership with Rackspace was blossoming, winning several joint customers together. Like us, the team at Rackspace was hungry to innovate and offer something unique and differentiated to our cloud infrastructure audience.
The ultimate managed Kubernetes experience
This collaboration led to the vision behind Spot, which we envisioned as “The Ultimate Managed Kubernetes Experience”; something different and valuable even in the crowded cloud landscape of 2020s.
Kubernetes as the cloud-core, not just a feature in a proprietary cloud
Do you remember the excitement in 2016, when Kubernetes was first announced, and those in the know would talk breathlessly about how this could truly be THE cloud control plane, with the cloud providers just offering compute? Well, by 2023, many companies were using Kubernetes, but the large public clouds had managed to relegate Kubernetes to be “just another feature” in their portfolio. People go to AWS for the breadth of services available there, with EKS being just one of many. Even if they build with EKS, the reality is that they are hopelessly locked into AWS, and they really have no fungibility or optionality when it comes to managing infrastructure elsewhere. What happened to the dream? Well, no one had managed to make it a reality; while the public clouds managed to “embrace and extend” Managed Kubernetes as just another feature.
Infrastructure truly offered as a commodity
The large public cloud providers have a remarkable business model: They sell commodity server infrastructure at 10x-12x the cost. Customers using EKS could be justified in thinking, “It’s Kubernetes after all”, but they use this incredible cloud technology only to pay 10-12x markup for the underlying compute!By virtue of Rackspace being one of the world’s largest alternative cloud providers, with a very large scale OpenStack cloud, we saw an opportunity to offer unused capacity from their OpenStack cloud as an opportunity to do something different. Because Kubernetes would be our cloud-core, we could offer infrastructure as a commodity; much like commodities are traded in mercantile markets. Prices would be set by a true market auction, instead of an arbitrary markup. Effectively, users and adoption would set market prices; and Rackspace could progressively release additional capacity as interest in the offering grows.We believe there are numerous benefits to this approach. For customers, we offer something different, an unbelievable value proposition where there is honesty in pricing and true price discovery. Our customers have gone on the record saying “It’s astonishing how inexpensive this is”. For Rackspace, we are reviving our culture of innovation and winning back customers with a compelling new product; and ultimately; we believe this product will be hugely accretive because there is so much value for end users. Finally, for the planet at large, reusing unused capacity is obviously a win.
Pure Kubernetes based Cloud API, including all adjunct cloud services
Again by virtue of building on Managed Kubernetes as our cloud-core, we could do something that no other major cloud provider has done: offer a pure Kubernetes based cloud API, across every feature available in Spot. The benefit to users: realize that dream that many of us in the cloud-native ecosystem once had: about how Kubernetes would be the critical cloud platform, enabling a more open-source based, “commodity cloud”. We’re doubling down in pursuit of that dream, so in addition to the Managed Kubernetes core, all data-services and other adjunct cloud services added to Spot will be based on Kubernetes operators; exposed via our Kubernetes based API. To our knowledge, no other major cloud provider commits to delivering such an experience.
Benchmarking Spot vs leading managed Kubernetes solutions
So, with that background, let’s compare how Rackspace Spot compares against other leading Managed Kubernetes solutions in the market. To keep this information digestible, we’re focusing on 5 other comparable solutions, using evaluation criteria commonly discussed by end users (for e.g. on r/kubernetes). One of the best articles we’ve seen providing a real, honest assessment of Managed Kubernetes solutions was this article on Medium by Elliot Graebart. We’ve requested Elliot to try and provide his own assessment of Rackspace Spot, but in the interim, we’re going to provide our self-assessment of how Rackspace Spot compares to the key metrics as outlined by Elliot.
As the table shows, Spot offers something new and novel in the Managed Kubernetes space. Compared to other Managed Kubernetes offerings, Rackspace Spot is:
- Easy to use, with a delightful general console interface
- Has a strong Kubernetes “native” experience
- Is *dramatically* cheaper than alternatives. When using Spot instances, Rackspace Spot is >80% cheaper than AWS EKS and GKE; and is >95% cheaper than their on-demand costs
- Does sacrifice some provisioning speed vs other solutions (we’ll explain why this is later)
Feature level comparison of Rackspace Spot vs other managed Kubernetes solutions
Let’s dig into each of these feature areas in greater detail.
Signup experience
As 1000s of users who have signed up for Rackspace Spot will tell you, signing up is easy and very low friction. Users have the choice of signup and authenticating with their Github ID, or with their Google account, or can choose a username + password to signup. Upon verification, which is nearly instantaneous, they are now setup to create an ‘Organization’ within which they can create and consume Kubernetes based Cloudspaces (clusters).
General console experience
As Elliot describes well in his review, some of the larger cloud providers have a bloated and confusing user experience. Ask anyone who uses AWS EKS and they will tell you how overwhelming it is to deal with the number of knobs and dials you can configure.
Good design is about delivering customers the substance of what really matters, and providing control on key elements, without creating a tiresome experience with option after option. Rackspace Spot takes this approach. It provides all the major dials that a business user would need and care about, without the overwhelming complexity of other Managed Kubernetes solutions.
Kubernetes console experience
When it comes to Kubernetes operations, Rackspace Spot provides “cluster lifecycle”, “node lifecycle” and “cluster health” information via its user console. For everything else, such as pods, resources, status and insights, users are expected to operate them “the Kubernetes way” i.e. with kubectl, or via the upstream Kubernetes dashboard.
This way, Spot aims to offer the controls and features that are not found in the native Kubernetes dashboard, keeping the interface simple and intuitive. These features include:
- Server pools (node pools) and associated configurations such as labels, annotations
- Bid prices and auto-scaling options for Spot Instance server pools (of course)!
- Control plane health: as measured by Kubernetes API server response times
- Node health and node controls such as recycling and rebooting
- Kubernetes upgrades
- Kubernetes options such as version, choice of CNI, and choice of pre-installed operators (e.g. NVIDIA GPU Operator)
Provisioning speed
New Cloudspaces (Kubernetes clusters) are spun up within 2-3 minutes. Based on Elliot’s reported numbers, we think on this metric, Rackspace Spot would rank 4th on his list, likely behind Linode, Azure AKS and DigitalOcean Kubernetes Service.
However, provisioning a functional node pool can often take ~7 minutes in Spot, and therefore, we’ve rated Spot as being worse than median on the provisioning Speed metric.
Why is this the case? Because Rackspace Spot is so heavily focused on spot instance capacity, most server provisioning in Spot involves pre-empting a server being used by another cluster (because it was a low bid price). To mitigate the impact of this action on the existing user / cluster, Spot provides a generous pre-emption notice of 5 minutes. These 5 minutes are the bulk of the reason why the node pool can take a little longer to provision. Ultimately, this was a design choice, and we believe that Spot is more useful to users when pre-emption impact is as graceful as possible.
This choice enables new, future innovations we have planned, which will provide an even higher level of value and automation to users of Spot instances (the likes of which doesn’t exist today). However, that does mean that Spot ranks in the lower half of Managed Kubernetes solutions when it comes to node provisioning speed.
Sane defaults
Rackspace Spot aims to provide a fully functional, fully usable Kubernetes cluster right out of the box. So, right out of the box, clusters come with pre-integrated IAM like access, OIDC configuration, CSI and CNI providers (including a choice of 3 different CNI configurations), ingress, load balancing and if using GPUs, the NVIDIA GPU operator (along with fractional MIG configuration!).
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
Rackspace Spot is far superior to other Managed Kubernetes services when it comes to the cost of ownership. With its focus on a pure, market driven auction for compute capacity; along with the features that make Spot instances more confidence inspiring to run (for e.g. capacity and price thresholds are visibile for each server pool; not just the final market cut-off price), Spot is the lowest cost Managed Kubernetes solution, by a long distance.
The best part? All of this is without the stress and complexity of long term contracts and commitments; savings plans, reserved instances. This is the power of honest spot instances, auctioned via a true market auction. It’s the ideal infrastructure you would want to use with the sophisticated orchestration capabilities that Kubernetes enables. Rackspace Spot now makes this possible: the Ultimate Managed Kubernetes experience. No matter whether you are a solo developer team, or a mid-large sized business, Spot can help you save large amounts of money on your cloud costs, with no lock-in whatsoever.
