community-edition VS kubespray

"They have even abandoned their Tanzu community edition." https://tanzucommunityedition.io/

Actually it is free for non-commercial use in a vSphere env up to 100 cores. For public cloud I have no idea how do they count the licenses/cores but you can give a shoot with the TKG. The TKG replaces the TCE. https://tanzucommunityedition.io

You choose to run production workloads on the community edition?

e.g. https://tanzucommunityedition.io/ has some opinions about how to set things up but there's no support contract, so I'd view it as providing guidance or defaults that are likely to work for most use-cases, similar to "I want to make a web app but i'm not already an expert with years of production experience, so i'll use a framework like django/rails/spring/etc. instead of writing free-form from scratch"

Tanzu Community Edition (https://tanzucommunityedition.io/) with "unmanaged clusters" is a fully free + OSS solution for using the cluster and package management tools of vmware's Tanzu without being locked in to other parts of the vmware stack. I honestly don't know all the details but there's a way of buying a support contract also.

You can check out TCE https://tanzucommunityedition.io/ This helps to setup in a single click with UI based deployment

Making its cluster available for many flavors through its Community Edition called TCE (Tanzu Community Edition)

Might I sugest Tanzu? https://tanzucommunityedition.io/

Tanzu Community Edition also supports vSphere/AWS - https://tanzucommunityedition.io/

Hey vnadkarni! Would be great for you to join the community on the Kubernetes Slack. Questions can also be posted in the GitHub Issues or Discussions.

When it came to deployment, I had several options, and I chose the hard way: deploying Kubernetes on bare metal nodes using KubeSpray. Troubleshooting bare metal Kubernetes deployments honed my skills in pinpointing issues. This hands-on experience provided a deep understanding of how each component, like the Control Plane, kubelet, Container Runtime, and scheduler, interacts to orchestrate containers.

Worth noting that if you like ansible, Kubespray has had documented air-gap installation since 2018 https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubespray/commit/963c3479...

calico v3.7.3 kubernetes v1.16.0 installed via kubespray https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubespray

About 1yr ago I ran k8s with 300 nodes using kube spray https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubespray . Never had any real issue with it. We did finally move to the cloud though.

I would highly recommend https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubespray

We build our own distro called Compliant Kubernetes, and we use (a fork of) kubespray to install the base Kubernetes layer. Our distro is entirely open source, so you can use it as a reference, if you want.

If you want to run Kubernetes on VM's you can look into kubespray and play around with the options for installing and checking the configuration after the fact.