<p>How does creating, developing on and operating K8s cluster differ -</p>

<p>when using <a href="https://gardener.cloud" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Gardener</a>.</p>

<p>OR</p>

<p>directly creating it in GCP / AWS?</p>

<p>I provisioned K8s cluster via Gardner. I now see compute instance created by Gardener (no GKE cluster).</p>

<p>Is that the sole difference, at least in the context of a K8s cluster being provisioned?</p>

<blockquote>
<p>How does creating, developing on and operating K8s cluster differ -</p>
<p>when using Gardener.</p>
<p>OR</p>
<p>directly creating it in GCP / AWS?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>They are just different ways of managing your cluster/clusters, in essence, they accomplish something very similar with some differences here an there.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Gardener: You have a 'garden' K8s to manage cluster on other cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, Azure, OpenStack. (Running on their server infrastructures like EC2 or GCE)</p>
</li>
<li><p>GCP / AWS. Here you can create your cluster with other tools like <a href="https://github.com/kubernetes/kops" rel="nofollow noreferrer">kops</a> or <a href="https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/setup-tools/kubeadm/kubeadm/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">kubeadm</a>. The cluster is created in underlying servers in GCE or EC2 (with autoscaling groups, etc)</p>
</li>
<li><p>GKE / EKS / AKS. These are managed services specific to each of the cloud providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. If you create a cluster with one of these you will only be able to manage it through the cloud providers specific API/Services. Their underlying infrastructure also happens to be EC2, GCE, Azure, depending on the cloud provider)</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>One advantage of Gardener appears to be able to create and manage clusters across multiple clouds from a single point.</p>
