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Revision poster: ownership by layer across platforms.

Infographic: a grid showing who owns the control plane, nodes, upgrades, networking add-ons, etcd backups and workloads on GKE, EKS and Rancher on-prem
Click the poster to enlarge it

Green cells are the provider's job. Amber cells are yours. The more green a column has, the less you operate and the more you rely on the provider's defaults.

  1. 1Managed control planes (GKE, EKS) include etcd and its backups.
  2. 2Autopilot also runs your nodes; EKS leaves nodes to you, Karpenter or Auto Mode.
  3. 3Upgrades range from automatic on a GKE channel to fully manual on-prem.
  4. 4Networking and storage add-ons are mostly built in on GKE and chosen by you on EKS and on-prem.
  5. 5Your workloads are always yours.

Self-check: cover the poster and answer

  • Which platform makes etcd backup your responsibility?
  • Why must provider-specific annotations stay out of shared manifests?

The API is the same everywhere; the operational job is not.

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