Managed Kubernetes vs Self-Hosted Kubernetes
The honest comparison for companies that need to run Kubernetes in production and auditably, without building a dedicated platform team.
Running Kubernetes yourself gives you full control, but it costs a dedicated platform team and constant operational work. Managed Kubernetes takes operations off your plate, in exchange you pick a partner carefully. Which path fits depends on your team, your compliance needs and your time horizon. Here is the fact-based comparison.
The most common challenges
Self-hosted needs a real platform team
Upgrades, etcd backups, CNI, Ingress, certificates, monitoring: this is not a side job. Without two or three experienced platform engineers, the cluster becomes a permanent construction site.
Compliance does not appear on its own
BaFin, ISO 27001 and GDPR require full auditability. With self-hosting you have to build and prove RBAC, policies and audit trails yourself.
Time to production drags on
Building a production-ready, secured in-house platform often takes months. During that time you are not shipping product yet.
The CCsolutions approach
Self-hosted is worth it if you already have a strong platform team, very specific requirements and want to build Kubernetes as a core competency. You keep every knob, but you carry the full operational load.
Managed Kubernetes is worth it if your team should ship product instead of maintaining clusters. You get provisioning, zero-downtime updates and 24/7 monitoring, while you keep sovereignty over your data and architecture.
CCsolutions runs your Kubernetes on the platform that fits your compliance, from Hetzner to AWS and Azure. GitOps with ArgoCD makes every change versioned and traceable, the audit trail forms automatically in operation instead of as an afterthought report.
Our advice: start managed and bring know-how into your own team gradually if you later want to take over. That way you ship immediately and build competency without risk.
Technologies
Frequently asked questions
Do I lose control with Managed Kubernetes?
No. The platform runs in your cloud or on-premise, you keep sovereignty over data and architecture. We operate, you decide.
Is self-hosted cheaper?
Rarely. You save the management fee, but staff, outage risk and the team's opportunity cost are usually higher than a managed contract.
Can I move from managed to self-hosted later?
Yes. Because everything is code and versioned with GitOps, you can take over operations with your own team gradually, without rebuilding.
Does Managed Kubernetes meet BaFin and ISO 27001?
Yes, we build the platform from the ground up for regulated environments, with RBAC, policies and a complete audit trail.
Ready to get started?
We analyse your situation for free and show what is possible in your specific case.
Free Kubernetes consultation