Ownkube vs self-managed Kubernetes
Running Kubernetes yourself gives you portability and total control. It also hands you a standing bill of platform work: builds, ingress and TLS, autoscaling, log and metric pipelines, upgrades, and rollbacks. Ownkube runs that recurring work for you on the same vanilla Kubernetes, so you keep the control without staffing a platform team to keep it running.
At a glance
Section titled “At a glance”| Capability | Ownkube | Self-managed Kubernetes |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first deploy | Push a repo, get a live URL in seconds | Provision a cluster, then wire up ingress, TLS, CI, and observability first |
| Builds | Builds and ships straight from a repo | You assemble and maintain the build and image pipeline |
| TLS and public URL | Automatic TLS on a Cloudflare-backed hostname with DDoS, bot, and scrape protection | You install and rotate certificates and run an ingress controller |
| Managed Postgres / cache | Managed Postgres 17 / 18 and a Valkey cache, one click each | You run an operator, or a database, and its backups yourself |
| Autoscaling | Horizontal autoscaling on CPU and memory, preconfigured | You configure and tune the autoscalers |
| Observability | Live logs plus CPU and memory metrics on every deployment | You stand up and operate the logging and metrics stack |
| Rollouts and rollbacks | Zero-downtime rolling updates and one-click rollbacks | You define and maintain the rollout and rollback strategy |
| Upgrades and maintenance | Platform and infrastructure updates handled for you | You own cluster upgrades, patches, and controller maintenance |
| Portability | Standard Kubernetes. Disconnect anytime and your apps keep running | Full portability, which you maintain yourself |
Where Ownkube is different
Section titled “Where Ownkube is different”The point of Ownkube is not to hide Kubernetes. It is to run the parts of it that never stop needing attention. You still get standard, vanilla infrastructure underneath: no proprietary runtime, no lock-in, disconnect anytime and your apps keep running.
Start on Ownkube-managed compute with a prepaid wallet, no cloud account, no cluster to provision. When you want your own cluster, Ownkube provisions and operates it in your AWS account. Two shapes: Starter, free, running on K3s on a single AWS instance, and Production on EKS, metered at $5 / vCPU / month plus $1 / GiB RAM / month on requested resources, where you pay AWS directly. Either way the same app runs unchanged, with least-privilege IAM and the workflow, dashboard, and observability coming along.
Where self-managed Kubernetes may fit you better
Section titled “Where self-managed Kubernetes may fit you better”If you already run a platform team and want full control over every controller, CRD, and network policy, doing it yourself is the right call. Specialized operators, unusual scheduling requirements, clouds beyond AWS today (GCP and Azure are coming soon on Ownkube), or a workload that needs to bend the cluster in ways a managed platform intentionally does not expose all point toward keeping the whole stack in your own hands.