Hey everyone! After nearly ten years of working with Kubernetes—including on-prem, managed, and even K8s@Edge—I'm curious about your thoughts on managed Kubernetes services. What do you think they're missing? Are there any integrations, features, or optimizations you wish were available right out of the box or just a simple toggle away?
3 Answers
You’ve got some serious experience! In my opinion, the biggest gaps in managed services like EKS, GKE, and AKS generally fall into three main areas. First is observability and debuggability; while you get basic metrics and logs, it would be amazing to have built-in tools for deep observability like full-stack traces or eBPF insights without needing third-party solutions. Second, I really think security posture management should be a baseline feature—things like Kyverno and OPA integration, and a default option for egress/ingress isolation would be super beneficial. Lastly, cluster bootstrap and environmental consistency need improvement, as managed services still rely heavily on IaC. It’d be great to see simplified ways to set up GitOps, secrets management, and autoscalers without coding thousands of lines of configuration every time.
You can actually set up Cilium network policies to default deny all ingress/egress for your whole cluster, which is a decent workaround.
I find that most managed Kubernetes services have their quirks. They become quite opinionated, which makes it feel like you’re just adding another distribution to your resume—like 'experienced with AKS, GKE, EKS.' A managed service should let you just consume a kubeadm cluster without adding unnecessary complexity.
If you’re genuinely curious and not a bot, then it's great that you want to hear others’ views! Framing it like this encourages meaningful discussions.
Totally agree! Security features should definitely be built-in rather than bolted on.