And I didn't expect it as well. Back then KubeSail was this little PaaS for people to play with Kubernetes, now its grown up, let's see what the new hosted and now, BYOC (Bring Your Own Cluster) service has to offer.

Why BYOC is a good thing

Well if you run your own nodes and wants a single pane of glass to use everything, this is certainly one of the ways to get your Kubernetes managed easily.

A lot of people (especially enterprises) use Kubernetes across multiple providers, and having a single admin dashboard helps a lot. There's alot of this kind of services, so this isn't so new, but for a Kubernetes PaaS that started out for people to play with Kubernetes to offer BYOC, now that's a surprise to be sure, but a welcome one.

Wait, what the heck is KubeSail?

As far as my memory goes when I found it last year, it was pitched more as a playground for Kubernetes, giving you access to one shared cluster with 1vCPU and 512MB memory to play with - and that's quite generous.

Wait... What does this platfrom had to do with BYOC even?

Good question. Because they seem to switched priorities, with that still the same free experiment cluster access (I haven't used it for a year, sorry KubeSail guys >_<).

And if you don't want to do BYOC, they have a very generous pricing, I recommend anyone to check it out.

Okay, fine, now how do I onboard my cluster to KubeSail then?

Well it seems to be easy, just go to the cluster page and click on "Add Cluster"

It should take you to this page, which includes a nifty kubectl apply -f command, and also includes a overview of the files that will be deployed to the cluster.

Now to show you that it works, I'm going to use IBM Cloud with a demo cluster as a sample:

The process is rather straightforward, and unlike most Kubernetes managers, KubeSail does not require an Ingress, which makes it compatible for k3s (though they probably don't support k3s that well).

And after a horrendously 30 long freaking minutes of provisioning, and blasting the national anthem of open source, here it is as it appears in the KubeSail dashboard.

It's still in Beta, Beware of Bugs!

Inasmuch BYOC is a good addition in KubeSail, keep in mind this is a rather new addition, and probably isn't production ready. But if you want to give this for a spin, head over to KubeSail and add your own!

And no, at the time of writing, it doesn't cost anything to do BYOC, so go add away!