Cloud vs. On-Prem: Which Is Better for Your Kubernetes Cluster?

There are many factors to consider when deploying application workloads. Many organizations use Kubernetes to deploy and containerize their workloads, as it provides enhanced scalability, self-healing and support for achieving high availability. However, a crucial decision needs to be made about how they wish to host their Kubernetes infrastructure: deployed on the cloud or managed using on-premises infrastructure.

Both options have advantages and disadvantages that might make one more suited to a specific use case. In this article, we will explore cloud and on-prem deployments, their pros and cons, and tips for choosing the method best suited to different use cases.

What Is Cloud Infrastructure?

The cloud refers to several devices, each with their own system resources, such as CPU, memory and storage, connected via a global network. A cloud provider (e.g., AWS, Azure or GCP) sources the physical devices and manages the physical infrastructure so that, rather than managing hardware, you can focus on deploying and managing your applications. Cloud services are usually provided on demand — i.e., you pay only for what and how much you use — and are designed to be highly scalable and resilient to downtime.

Using cloud services can reduce developers’ operational overhead: When deploying applications on Kubernetes, cloud providers play a huge role in provisioning and managing infrastructure for the Kubernetes cluster. They also handle the operational challenges with Kubernetes maintenance, such as cluster upgrades, backup and restore, disaster management, and scaling.

Even if you self-manage your cluster using kOps or a similar tool, you can still leverage cloud services by using virtual machines (VMs) such as AWS’s EC2 instances. Managed Kubernetes clusters, such as EKS, AKS and GKE, are widely used for deploying production applications, as they integrate well with cloud providers’ ecosystems, and teams do not need to maintain the cluster infrastructure.

What Is On-Premises Infrastructure?

On-prem is when you source the physical infrastructure, set it up and handle maintenance activities within your organization. The organization owns all the servers and infrastructure components. Setting up infrastructure yourself takes more time than provisioning infrastructure from a cloud provider, and it has to be regularly maintained, with tasks including upgrading the infrastructure, performing regular security checks and installing security patches.

The process of deploying Kubernetes clusters on premises is a lot more complex than using a cloud provider. You must first virtualize the entire infrastructure using a Tier 1 hypervisor, such as VMware vSphere or Proxmox. Then, you need to manually create all the required VMs to act as Kubernetes nodes, generate the SSL certificates, handle machine DNS and set up the Kubernetes cluster. Setting up autoscaling mechanisms comes with additional challenges if you don’t have access to support. And after setting up the initial cluster, you still have to perform regular maintenance activities such as certificate rotations, cluster upgrades and node upgrades.

If you want to distribute the Kubernetes clusters across multiple availability zones, you need to find a data center, source and set up the physical infrastructure across each data center, and handle the networking to enable seamless node communication. Comparatively, when trying to achieve the same result with a cloud provider, you must specify the region where you wish to provision your nodes.

Cloud vs. On-Prem: Practical Differences

Hosting your application workloads using a cloud provider and deploying infrastructure completely on premises have significant differences.

Deployment

There are important differences between how infrastructure is deployed and managed in both methods.

• Cloud: While there are different types of cloud providers, including public, private and hybrid clouds, how applications and services are deployed largely remains the same. The physical infrastructure is owned and managed by the cloud provider. As a cloud user, you need to provision the appropriate infrastructure, such as a Kubernetes cluster, and deploy your applications. The deployed applications exist on the cloud provider’s infrastructure.
• On-Prem: In on-prem infrastructure, you will first need to configure the infrastructure properly — install an appropriate operating system, bootstrap a Kubernetes cluster and configure the cluster components (e.g., networking, storage) — and then deploy the application. The deployed application exists on your infrastructure, and you manage the application and the different processes involved in it.

Cost

Costs can vary depending on the scale of your workloads. With on-prem deployments, you have a large one-time investment along with recurring costs for infrastructure maintenance; cloud providers have recurring costs that can be optimized.

• Cloud:  When deploying applications on the cloud, you pay only for the resources you are using. For example, if you provision 10 VMs from a cloud provider, you only pay the operational costs for the VMs.
• On-Prem: When deploying applications on premises, you source the infrastructure and pay the hardware costs up front, then pay for managing the infrastructure, power consumption and physical space over time.

Control

The level of control differs significantly between on-premises and cloud environments, and impacts how organizations manage their infrastructure, applications and data. Greater control might be essential for certain use cases.

• Cloud: When running applications in the cloud, control is shared between the user and the cloud provider due to the shared responsibility model: The cloud provider controls the entire infrastructure, while users control their applications and their deployment configurations. The cloud provider also abstracts a lot of the underlying infrastructure, which limits the level of control you have. Moreover, certain requirements might lead to cloud vendor lock-in.
• On-Prem: An on-prem infrastructure gives you complete control over every aspect of the application, including the hardware resources as well as data storage and movement. This full control enables you to ensure data doesn’t leave your premises, to customize the infrastructure in any way that you like, and to optimize the hardware and software to meet your use case’s security or other requirements.

Security

Security can be a deciding factor in choosing an on-prem or cloud deployment.

• Cloud: Security remains one of the main concerns of deploying workloads on the cloud. The cloud provider is responsible for maintaining infrastructure security. Data breaches on cloud providers do occur, causing leaked credentials, loss of intellectual property and more. Using security scanning tools such as Trivy for container images can help protect your application’s security.
• On-Prem: Industries such as government, banking and healthcare often require the high level of security, privacy and control that on-premises environments provide. Strict compliance regulations and data residency laws make retaining full ownership of infrastructure essential for protecting sensitive information. While cloud providers offer robust security, the shared responsibility model introduces risks that some organizations cannot accept. Despite higher costs and complexity, on-premises setups remain the preferred choice for sectors where data breaches or compliance failures could have severe consequences.

Maintenance

After the initial infrastructure is set up, regular maintenance tasks remain, including software and hardware upgrades, as well as replacement of faulty equipment. Whether you’re using cloud or on-prem infrastructure, effective maintenance is critical to ensure uptime, security and performance

• Cloud: In a cloud environment, the provider manages the underlying infrastructure, including hardware updates, patches and network configurations. Organizations are responsible for maintaining their applications, data and configurations, but the operational burden of physical hardware and infrastructure maintenance is eliminated. This enables teams to focus more on innovation and less on routine upkeep.
• On-Prem: On-premises environments require organizations to handle all aspects of maintenance. This provides full control, but adds significant operational overhead, requiring skilled personnel and ongoing investment in tools and resources.

Compliance

Compliance ensures organizations adhere to laws, regulations and standards that govern their operations, particularly in areas like data privacy, financial accountability and industry-specific requirements. It is crucial for protecting sensitive information, avoiding legal penalties and maintaining trust with customers and stakeholders. Compliance helps businesses safeguard their reputation and credibility by promoting transparency and accountability. In an era of increasing data breaches and privacy concerns, robust compliance frameworks are essential for mitigating risks and demonstrating ethical practices.

• Cloud: In cloud environments, compliance responsibilities are shared between the provider and the customer. Providers often obtain certifications for their infrastructure (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001), but organizations must ensure their data handling, configurations and applications meet regulatory standards. This shared responsibility requires careful vendor selection and ongoing audits to maintain compliance.
• On-Prem: In on-premises environments, organizations have full control and responsibility for meeting compliance requirements. This includes managing data security, infrastructure and access controls to adhere to relevant regulations. While this level of control provides flexibility, it also demands significant expertise and resources to ensure ongoing compliance.

What About Hybrid Cloud?

A hybrid cloud architecture combines the advantages of on-premises infrastructure (or private clouds) and public cloud services. In this model, workloads and data can move seamlessly between on-premises environments and cloud platforms, providing flexibility, scalability and control. Organizations can use hybrid cloud solutions to balance their operational needs, such as keeping sensitive data on premises while leveraging the scalability of the public cloud for less critical workloads or peak demands.

Hybrid cloud models often rely on orchestration and unified management tools to provide seamless integration between the environments. Technologies like containerization and Kubernetes play a significant role in enabling this interoperability, allowing applications to run consistently across on-premises and cloud infrastructure.

Hybrid cloud environments are widely adopted across industries that require a balance between flexibility and control. For instance:

• Finance and banking: Sensitive customer data is kept in on-premises data centers and the public cloud is used for analytics and customer-facing applications.
• Healthcare: Storing patient records on-prem and utilizing cloud platforms for telemedicine and research can increase compliance with data privacy regulations.
• Retail: Using hybrid clouds helps retailers manage seasonal spikes in demand, processing regular operations on-prem while bursting into the cloud during peak sales periods.

A hybrid cloud is also beneficial for businesses transitioning from legacy systems to modern cloud native architectures, as it enables a phased approach without disrupting ongoing operations.

Management Tools and Frameworks

When running a Kubernetes cluster designed for production, you want to use a robust mechanism for managing the entire cluster. While kubectl helps manage and interact with the Kubernetes cluster, it is not recommended to use it for managing a production cluster: It doesn’t provide overall visibility of all the resources, requires complex commands to perform actions and can be tedious to navigate between multiple clusters.

There are tools to help manage clusters in cloud and on-prem environments: While some can be used for both environments, others are more powerful in one or the other.

Cloud Management Tools

Here are some tools that are most helpful for operating, automating and managing a Kubernetes cluster’s life cycle in cloud environments.

• KEDA, HPA and Karpenter: Autoscaling tools such as Kubernetes Event Driven Autoscaler (KEDA), Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) and Karpenter are most powerful when they are used on a managed Kubernetes cluster. When running on the cloud, these autoscalers can easily scale up the infrastructure as much as required without running out of resources.
• OpenCost: When running a Kubernetes cluster on the cloud, it is very easy to overspend. OpenCost can help you gain insights into overall spending on the cluster, and you can set autoscaling policies to help manage costs.
• Karmada: Karmada is an open source tool that helps make it easier to manage Kubernetes clusters across multiple clouds. It can be most useful when you have multiple Kubernetes clusters hosted across different cloud providers
• AWS CloudFormation: AWS CloudFormation allows you to deploy multiple AWS-specific resources — such as S3 buckets, EC2 instances and more — in a declarative, codified way. This can be useful for automatically provisioning resources for the Kubernetes cluster in certain conditions. While CloudFormation is specific to AWS, Azure, GCP and cloud providers have similar services.
• Devtron and Rancher: A cluster management tool such as Devtron or Rancher can help you deploy and manage complex applications at scale while abstracting out the Kubernetes complexities.

On-Premises Management Tools

There are multiple tools that can help you set up and manage your Kubernetes cluster on premises. They provide immense value, as on-prem setups lack the cluster management features provided by cloud providers.

• K3S and RKE2: K3S is a lightweight Kubernetes distribution, while RKE2 has a strong focus on security. Both tools are easy to set up compared to a traditional Kubernetes bootstrap process with Kubeadm or similar tools.
• Vault: Kubernetes secrets are not encrypted and are encoded in Base64 format. Using an external secret manager like Vault can prevent the leak of secret keys and environment variables.
• Devtron’s Kubernetes Dashboard: Devtron’s Kubernetes Dashboard acts as a single tool to help users manage multiple Kubernetes clusters from a single pane of glass. While not specific to on-prem environments, it helps operators manage clusters, offering visibility into all cluster resources, deploying and managing Helm charts, and supporting the cluster upgrade process. It comes with robust role-based access control (RBAC) support to limit access among team members.
• Ceph: Ceph is a distributed storage system that handles persistent data reliability. It can be used to manage the storage drivers within your Kubernetes clusters. Ceph has dedicated Container Storage Interface (CSI) drivers, which help make it compatible with Kubernetes block storage devices.

Conclusion

Choosing between cloud, on-premises and hybrid environments depends on an organization’s unique scalability, cost, control and compliance needs. Cloud solutions offer unparalleled flexibility and ease of scaling, while on-premises setups provide unmatched control and security for sensitive workloads. On the other hand, a hybrid cloud strikes a balance by combining the best of both worlds, enabling businesses to optimize their infrastructure for specific use cases.

Devtron can help simplify many of the complexities associated with Kubernetes, whether it’s hosted in the cloud or on premises, by simplifying application management and cluster management. If you are looking for an end-to-end solution for managing your Kubernetes clusters, please check out Devtron’s GitHub repository and try it out.

As technology evolves, organizations must carefully evaluate their operational goals, compliance requirements and budgetary constraints to determine the right strategy. Whether leveraging the cloud for agility, on-prem for control or hybrid for versatility, the key lies in aligning the infrastructure with business priorities to drive efficiency and innovation.