Exoscale Scalable Kubernetes Service

What Exoscale Scalable Kubernetes Service is

Exoscale Scalable Kubernetes Service (SKS) is a managed service for deploying, scaling, and hosting containerized applications in Europe. Exoscale operates the Kubernetes control plane and provides its upgrades, reducing routine cluster maintenance. Its product page says fully managed clusters can be started in less than one minute. The free Starter Cluster includes a managed control plane, CLI, API, Terraform integration, and automatic control-plane patch upgrades. Pro Cluster is billed hourly, with pricing not shown as a numeric amount; it adds a highly available control plane, etcd backups, a 99.95% SLA, and Karpenter autoscaling. Karpenter can dynamically provision compute resources. SKS integrates Network Load Balancers for ingress and Kubernetes-compatible instance pools, while its CSI driver supports block or object storage for stateful workloads. Clusters have minimal exposure by default, with controls for authentication, network policies, and role-based access. Kubernetes Audit shows user and system actions. SKS is vanilla Kubernetes, so monitoring, GitOps, and security tools are not installed by default. It supports up to three clusters.

Who it suits

SKS may suit European developers and data engineers building cloud-native applications who want a managed Kubernetes control plane. Teams should account for the three-cluster limit and the need to add tools such as monitoring or GitOps themselves.

Limits

Starter has no SLA. SKS does not install monitoring, GitOps, or security solutions by default, and the service has a three-cluster limit.

Getting started

1. Visit the SKS website.
2. Choose the free Starter Cluster or the Pro Cluster.
3. Use the CLI, API, or Terraform integration to work with Starter.
4. Configure authentication, network policies, and role-based access.
5. Add compatible instance pools, Network Load Balancers, or storage as needed.

Verdict

SKS handles control-plane operations and provides a free Starter Cluster, with additional availability and autoscaling features in Pro. It remains a vanilla Kubernetes service, so teams needing monitoring, GitOps, or security tooling must install those separately.