Installing, updating, and maintaining a Kubernetes cluster is a complex task. If your company is not a cloud provider, you need to hire a team of experts to manage your Kubernetes cluster. This is not only expensive but also time-consuming. You also have to invest a lot of time and money to keep your Kubernetes cluster up to date, which is especially true if you want to use the latest features of Kubernetes and its ecosystem.
To outsource these tasks, a managed Kubernetes service (Kubernetes as a Service) should be considered. With a managed Kubernetes offering, you can fully focus on your business and applications by abstracting away the complexity of managing your Kubernetes cluster and its underlying cloud infrastructure.
SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) offers a managed Kubernetes service called SAP BTP, Kyma runtime. Unlike a vanilla Kubernetes cluster, SAP BTP, Kyma runtime comes with additional features provided by the Kyma modules. These capabilities were already covered in the previous lesson.
Typically, Kubernetes users would have to decide between different solutions for their environment (for example, if they want to use Istio or Linkerd service mesh). The decision-making process is complex and time-consuming as well as integrating, maintaining, and updating these solutions. When you use Kyma runtime, the most important tools are already integrated out-of-the-box with the Kyma modules. This saves you a lot of time and money. Moreover, SAP BTP, Kyma runtime goes one step further as it takes care of the maintenance and updates of the Kyma modules and the underlying cluster.
