Alternatives to kube-up.sh

The kube-up.sh script is still a pretty handy way to get started using Kubernetes on your platform of choice. However, it's not without flaws and can sometimes run aground when conditions are not just so.

Luckily, since K8's inception, a number of alternative methods for creating clusters have emerged. Two such GitHub projects are KOPs and kube-aws. While the later is tied to AWS, they both provide an alternative method to easily spinning up your new cluster:

• https://github.com/kubernetes/kops
• https://github.com/coreos/kube-aws

Additionally, a number of managed services have arisen including Google Container Engine (GKE) and Microsoft Azure Container Service (ACS), which provide an automated install and some managed cluster operations. We will look at a brief demo of these in Chapter 12, Towards Production Ready.