It’s here, there, and everywhere! Vultr Kubernetes Engine (VKE) is now Generally Available. It only takes a few minutes to create a fully managed Kubernetes cluster, in 24 global locations.

Additionally, we’re pleased to introduce a new, globally available Block Storage (HDD) product, which makes it easy to attach hard disk drives to your Kubernetes clusters and VMs via low-latency networks.

Kubernetes, Simplified

While Kubernetes is an open-source, free platform, that doesn’t mean Kubernetes is easy or inexpensive to use – in fact, it’s often not!

Setting up and managing a Kubernetes cluster atop your own machines is a LOT of time-consuming and tricky grunt work.

But with VKE, you can spin up Kubernetes clusters atop Vultr’s elastic cloud infrastructure in just a few steps:

1. Go to the Kubernetes tab in the control panel.

2. Choose a cluster name, Kubernetes version and location.

3. Add node pools with any of our instance types – including our new Optimized Cloud Compute powered by AMD EPYC processors.

4. Click the 'Deploy Now' button.

5. Once your cluster is ready, download the configuration file, fire up a terminal, and run this command to check your pods:

$ kubectl --kubeconfig=kube_config.yaml get pods -A

Certified and Fully Managed

VKE is a CNCF Certified Conformant service, so you can easily deploy your existing Kubernetes apps to our service.

Once provisioned, Vultr Kubernetes Engine monitors and administers your cluster. For example, if one of your nodes should fail for any reason, VKE automatically spins up a new one.

And as CNCF releases new versions of Kubernetes, we’re always quick to offer them with VKE. You can initiate upgrades via the control at whatever time is convenient for you. We currently support the latest minor releases: 1.23, 1.22, and 1.21.

For more about Vultr Kubernetes Engine, watch this video with David Dymko, Director of Engineering, Cloud Native at Vultr.

Making Kubernetes Affordable with a Free Control Plane

We care deeply about making Vultr’s products affordable and accessible to everyone: individual developers, small and medium businesses, and the enterprise.

Big Tech cloud providers typically charge upwards of $70 per month to manage Kubernetes. In contrast, VKE’s control plane is completely free, no strings attached.

With our managed Kubernetes service, you'll only pay for the underlying resources that you use with your cluster: your worker nodes, block storage, load balancers, and network utilization.

This simplified, cost-efficient approach to Kubernetes makes it possible for anyone to get started. We encourage you to use VKE as your Kubernetes learning playground if you’re just getting started with the de facto standard container orchestration platform.

One More Thing: Block Storage (HDD)

Because VKE worker nodes are inherently ephemeral, we needed to deliver a persistent storage solution to accompany our managed Kubernetes service.

So, to go along with our VKE release, we’re introducing a new Block Storage (HDD) product, in almost all of our cloud data center locations.

Block Storage (HDD) provides you the ability to attach large amounts of persistent storage to your Kubernetes clusters or virtual machines. While we continue to offer NVMe SSD Block Storage, you’ll often find HDD storage the better, more affordable option for applications that need not constantly read from and write to disk.

Deploy to Vultr Kubernetes Engine today

Getting started with VKE is as simple as provisioning a cluster in the control panel . Visit our Docs library for detailed guides and instructions.

If you’d like to discuss migrating a large scale application to VKE, we encourage you to contact us to speak with members of our sales and solutions engineering teams.