What we have found out is that most on-prem customers are eager to move to the cloud. Practically it's not easy to just lift-and-shift. So think of this is a ramp to the cloud.

Now, the benefit of upstream K8s is that your dev team can build apps and containers without proprietary APIs; so when you are ready to move to the cloud you are not locked-in.

Thanks. I agree that lift and shift never happens easily in real life.

That being said, why would I not use the actual free upstream Kubernetes for my on-prem distribution ? (with the help of one of the thousands installer out there like kube-adm, kubespray, etc).

What I have seen working with Kubernetes for quite a while, is that the lowest common demominator is the YAML definitions for your workloads (what you want to run on your Kubernetes cluster). Those should be portable accross any Kubernetes distribution, on-prem or on the cloud. As far as I can tell, today this is already the case.

Is the benefit in this case that you can use the Google ecosystem for logs etc ?

Kubeadm and others help install, but they don't manage clusters over time. We find that the ongoing management of GKE is what really speaks to people.

The workloads will still be as portable as ever, of course.

> That being said, why would I not use the actual free upstream Kubernetes for my on-prem distribution ? (with the help of one of the thousands installer out there like kube-adm, kubespray, etc).

None of them actually provision your infra for you (VMs, LB rules etc). GKE On-Prem will.

Ok, thanks I got it, you are bundling everything into a VMWare image, that boots ready to use.

Is it fair to say that this is similar to Canonical Ubuntu MAAS + Juju Kubernetes? I'm sure that Red Hat Openshift must have something similar also to install directly on a pool of managed bare metals.

I don't know enough about Juju K8s to really say similar it is. GKE On-Prem will be an OS image, set of containers, config, tooling and support.