My review of Kubernetes distributions: AKS: (not tested yet) EKS: Fucking difficult. Glacial. GKE: Nice wizard. Slow. LKE: Amazingly simple, bloody fast. Microk8s: I just seem to break it a lot. Kind: Easiest, fastest, but obviously multiple nodes are all on same machine...

Every time I use AWS I regret it. I wanted Kubernetes to be a way to abstract it all vendor neutral so I didn't have to care, but it's not that simple. Linode, especially LKE, is wonderful for production workloads. Kind is great for local testing. That's my snap judgement.

I've only ever used kind for local stuff; and then whatever horror amazon offer for deployment (though I wasn't in charge of that, just had to debug when it went wrong) kind was pretty easy to get going. Amazon's stuff is presumably very competent, but incomprehensible.

It's not. Everyone just seems to use cloudformation templates and/or terraform to manage it, which is anathema to how I want to handle infrastructure like this. Try LKE sometime, it's so so nice, and the master node is free (if not HA!) so just pay for the nodes!