Stop Running Kubernetes the Hard Way

Running Kubernetes used to mean owning everything: control plane, nodes, upgrades, networking, the 2am pages. But the managed-service model has quietly turned much of that into a commodity. The question worth asking now isn’t how to run Kubernetes, it’s how little you actually need to. This talk walks through what a provider like AWS can take off your plate, and where the line still sits. We’ll look at managed add-ons, EKS Auto Mode, managed node groups, Pod Identity, and the deep integrations that blur the boundary between cluster and cloud - plus what they mean for performance, scalability, and operational burden. The goal isn’t a feature tour, but an honest look at the trade-offs: what you gain by offloading, what you give up in control, and how to decide which parts of “running Kubernetes” are still worth owning yourself.