As you may have realized from reading the previous section, there are different possible ways to deploy Kubernetes.
One of them is to deploy it to bare-metal servers hosted on-premises. One of the benefits is that this may be cheaper for large-scale applications than what the cloud providers offer. This approach has one major drawback—you will require an operator to provide the additional nodes whenever necessary.
To mitigate this issue, you can run a virtualization appliance on top of your bare-metal servers. This makes it possible to use the Kubernetes built-in cloud controller to provision the necessary resources automatically. You still have the same control over the costs, but there's less manual work. Virtualization adds some overhead, but in most cases, this should be a fair trade-off.
If you are not interested in hosting the servers yourself, you can deploy Kubernetes to run on top of VMs from a cloud provider...
