Deciding between managing Kubernetes in-house or partnering with a managed service provider can be a difficult choice for organizations seeking to optimize their cloud infrastructure. Over the past several years, I’ve been part of the decision to hire talent in-house or use a managed service provider (not for Kubernetes management, of course—that’s where our team shines the brightest!).

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Most organizations make these types of decisions often, especially in areas such as payroll, graphic design, and accounting. Many factors go into the decision including our time and expertise to supervise the employee and the evolving needs of the business. When a skill is going to be a long term strategic asset to our business, I nearly always choose to hire an internal expert to join our team.

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Practical Guidelines

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When it comes to choosing to hire a service provider or in-house talent to drive your business forward, lean on these practical guidelines:

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Align with Core Competencies: For jobs that are central to your organization’s mission, developing internal expertise is nearly always the best choice. This approach ensures that the team handling these tasks is deeply integrated into your company’s culture and objectives.

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Leverage Established Solutions: Often, engineers pride themselves on building something new and better. For challenges that have already been effectively addressed by existing solutions, however, it is usually best to use existing solutions or experts. In other words, don’t expend resources unnecessarily to reinvent something. Instead, benefit from proven solutions or practices when possible.

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Scalability and Growth: While large enterprises, like Apple or Microsoft, might have the capacity to bring everything in-house, smaller organizations must examine which functions to outsource carefully. This approach enables you to focus on areas where you can achieve the most significant business impact.

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Another aspect to consider is whether you’re choosing between a managed service provider or a short-term consultant or project-based consulting agreement. Managed service providers typically have a vested interest in the sustained success of their clients because they offer ongoing support and optimization as part of a long-term contract. In contrast, some consultants may focus on short-term projects without a commitment to your organization’s long-term outcomes.

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Cloud Infrastructure Management

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Managing cloud infrastructure is a bit like a band using a recording studio. While the band’s unique music is their core product, the recording equipment and studio environment are essential tools that support the creation of the band’s music. However, mastering the intricacies of studio design or sound engineering could divert them from their primary focus—making music with their signature sound. Does every member of the band need to be a sound engineer to make good music? Definitely not.

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Similarly, organizations should concentrate on building and differentiating their core services and consider outsourcing complex infrastructure management to specialists. Building, deploying, and maintaining cloud infrastructure isn’t what makes most companies money. They need the infrastructure, but not the in-house skills to build and manage it. In short, to maximize the chance of success, organizations should internalize functions that are central to their core competencies and outsource tasks that (while important) do not define their unique value proposition.

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As businesses adopt Kubernetes or increase their K8s footprint, a common question is whether it makes sense build an in-house team (perhaps starting with hiring a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)) to manage Kubernetes or bring in a Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service (KaaS) provider.

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Below are ten key questions to help guide your decision-making process.

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1. What is our core business focus, and does Kubernetes management augment it?

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If your primary business goal is building software products or delivering services, managing Kubernetes in-house might divert valuable resources from where they’re needed most. A managed service allows you to focus on your core business while experts handle Kubernetes operations. However, if infrastructure management is a strategic advantage (such as in a cloud monitoring SaaS company), having an SRE or an internal team might be worth the investment.

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2. Do we have (or can we attract) the right Kubernetes expertise?

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Kubernetes is complex, and hiring skilled professionals—like an SRE team—can be both challenging and expensive. If you already have DevOps engineers in-house who understand Kubernetes well, building an internal team might be fairly simple. On the other hand, if hiring or training your team on Kubernetes is a bottleneck, a managed Kubernetes provider can offer immediate expertise, reducing the learning curve and accelerating your deployments.

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3. How much control do we need over our Kubernetes environment?

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If your organization requires full control over networking, security, storage, and custom configurations, an in-house SRE team gives you the flexibility to fine-tune Kubernetes for your organization’s unique needs. A Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service provider, on the other hand, may remove some of the fine-grained control from your team.

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4. What are our uptime, reliability, and performance requirements?

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Mission-critical applications require high availability and rapid disaster recovery capabilities. An experienced SRE can optimize performance, ensure redundancy, and set up incident response protocols tailored to your business, but particularly if you have a small SRE team, they’ll always be on call for infrastructure pages and they’ll be the go to person for everything infrastructure-related.

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5. What are the true costs of hiring vs. outsourcing Kubernetes management?

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An SRE’s salary can exceed $150K–$200K per year, not including benefits, tools, training, and additional operations support. Organizations should calculate the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for both approaches, considering:

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Salaries, training, and hiring costs
Infrastructure and tool expenses
Downtime and operational inefficiencies

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6. How quickly do we need to deploy and scale Kubernetes?

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If your team needs to deploy Kubernetes rapidly, a managed service provider can deliver environments configured to align with Kubernetes best practices quickly, reducing the time to deployment considerably. In contrast, hiring an SRE and building an internal Kubernetes team requires time for recruitment, onboarding, and infrastructure setup. If speed is important, a managed service provider can accelerate your path to deploying production workloads.

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7. What level of security and compliance do we require?

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Security is a top concern for Kubernetes environments because Kubernetes is not secure by default. If your organization operates in a regulated industry (finance, healthcare, and government to name just a few), compliance requirements may demand stricter control over configurations, access management, and logging.

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An in-house SRE team provides full control over security policies.

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8. How will we handle ongoing monitoring, incident response, and troubleshooting?

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Kubernetes requires continuous monitoring and proactive issue resolution. An in-house SRE team can:

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Customize observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, and so on)
Create automated alerting systems
Implement self-healing mechanisms

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But in-house teams must also monitor, respond to, and resolve infrastructure alerts quickly.

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9. Are we planning for a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud strategy?

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If your organization intends to deploy Kubernetes across multiple cloud providers (AWS, GCP, and Azure) or in a hybrid-cloud setup, managing Kubernetes internally provides the flexibility to optimize workloads across different environments. That also means your internal team will need to know the details of each cloud service provider.

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10. What is our long-term Kubernetes roadmap?

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Kubernetes is constantly maturing, requiring organizations to keep up with upgrades, security patches, and feature changes in K8s, related APIs, and add-ons. If your business requires long-term control and deep Kubernetes expertise, investing in an internal team makes sense.

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However, if Kubernetes is a means to an end rather than a strategic focus, outsourcing management to a trusted provider ensures you always have access to up-to-date infrastructure without needing to stay ahead of Kubernetes advancements yourself.

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Which Path is Right for You?

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If Kubernetes is mission-critical, requires deep customization, and your organization has the resources to build and retain an internal team, hiring an SRE may be the right choice.

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If you want to focus on your applications and business growth while offloading Kubernetes complexities, a Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service provider offers a faster, cost-effective, and scalable solution. The decision depends on your business goals, in-house expertise, and operational priorities.

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