5 — Federation

Kubernetes

A book-shaped table of contents for Kubernetes: cloud-native foundations, the CKAD/CKA/CKS certification tracks, control-plane internals, platform tooling, multi-cluster architecture, and MAANG-level system design and interview prep — cross-linking the existing Prometheus, Observability, and Platform Engineering chapters instead of duplicating them.

1 — AKS

AKS makes the control plane free specifically so Azure can win on node-hour billing, which is why the real cost and design battle moves to node pool sizing, availability zones, and Azure CNI IP exhaustion.

4 — Cluster API

Cluster API models a whole cluster's lifecycle (bootstrap, upgrade, scale, teardown) as Kubernetes custom resources, turning fleet management into just another reconciliation loop instead of a bespoke provisioning script.

2 — EKS

EKS charges for the control plane yet still leaves CoreDNS, kube-proxy, and the CNI as self-managed add-ons, proving that 'managed Kubernetes' is a spectrum of responsibility rather than a single guarantee.

3 — GKE

GKE Autopilot bills per-pod resource request rather than per-node, which inverts the usual capacity-planning problem by making the scheduler itself the thing you optimize for cost, not the node pool.