Choosing the right OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes Plan: Free or Standard

Objective

This guide provides an overview of OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes Service (MKS) plans, aiming to present the available plan options Free and Standard and their primary characteristics. It is intended to help readers understand the purpose of each plan and navigate the differences without making recommendations.

Free vs Standard plan comparison

OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes Service (MKS) offers two plans, Free Plan and Standard Plan, designed to address different workloads and use cases. This section highlights their key differences, focusing on architecture, availability, and scalability.

Control plane

The control plane orchestrates the Kubernetes cluster, handling scheduling, scaling, and API requests. The Free plan provides a single zone managed control plane suitable for development or small projects. In contrast, the Standard plan includes cross-availability-zone (AZ) resilience, ensuring the cluster continues to operate even if one AZ experiences an outage.

Example: A Standard plan cluster can remain fully functional during an AZ failure, whereas a Free plan cluster relies on a single zone.

Availability

Availability measures the expected uptime of the service. The Free plan offers a 99.5% SLO, appropriate for non critical workloads. The Standard plan provides a 99.99% SLA at General Availability, making it suitable for production environments that require high reliability.

Example: A Free plan cluster may experience roughly 43 minutes of downtime per month, while a Standard plan cluster reduces this to about 4 minutes.

etcd storage

etcd maintains cluster state and configuration. The Free plan uses a shared etcd storage with a maximum capacity of 400 MB, which suffices for small deployments. The Standard plan uses dedicated etcd storage up to 8 GB, supporting larger clusters and heavier workloads.

Maximum cluster size

Cluster size defines the number of worker nodes in the Kubernetes cluster. The Free plan supports up to 100 nodes, suitable for learning, testing, or small-scale projects. The Standard plan scales up to 500 nodes, enabling medium to large production deployments.

Regional availability

Regional availability determines the number of zones on which the cluster is deployed. The Free plan is limited to a single zone, while the Standard plan is deployed across three availability zones (in 3-AZ regions), improving resilience and minimising the impact of outages at the zone level.

Example: A cluster with the Standard plan deployed in a 3-AZ region can maintain application continuity if a zone goes down, while a cluster with the Free plan would go down.

Supported regions by plan

The availability of OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes varies by plan. The Free plan is available in multiple single-zone regions worldwide, while the Standard plan is available in both single-zone and multi-zone regions for enhanced resilience.

For a complete list of supported regions by plan and their deployment architecture (1-AZ vs 3-AZ), see the following guide: Datacenters, nodes and storage flavors - Regional availability by MKS plan.

Standard plan exclusive features

In addition to multi-zone deployment, the Standard plan includes advanced features not available on the Free plan:

• Floating IPs per node: Automatically assign public Floating IPs to worker nodes in a node pool for direct public access and node bandwidth usage. This feature is exclusively available on the Standard plan. For more information, see the Using Floating IPs on MKS Standard guide.
• Cross-AZ resilience: Enhanced cluster availability across multiple availability zones (in 3-AZ regions).
• Production-grade SLA: 99.9% SLA for 1-AZ regions, 99.99% SLA for 3-AZ regions.
• Dedicated etcd storage: Up to 8GB for larger clusters.
• Up to 500 nodes: Support for large-scale production deployments.

Summary

The following table summarizes the key differences between the Free plan and the Standard plan of OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes Service (MKS):

This summary provides a quick overview of the differences between the Free plan and the Standard plan, highlighting architecture, availability, storage, cluster size, and regional deployment.

Go further

To have an overview of the OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes service, visit the OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes page.

To explore detailed quotas, resource limits, and regional restrictions for the Free plan and Standard plan, consult our Known limits guide. This guide provides in-depth technical specifications to help you plan and scale your Kubernetes clusters effectively.

To deploy your first application on your Kubernetes cluster, we invite you to follow our guides to configure default settings for kubectl and to deploy a Hello World application.

If you need training or technical assistance to implement our solutions, contact your sales representative or click on this link to get a quote and ask our Professional Services experts for a custom analysis of your project.

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