Kubernetes is AWS's fastest-growing managed service because the EKS API handles control plane provisioning, node group scaling, IAM-integrated authentication, and load balancer wiring, letting teams focus on workloads rather than cluster plumbing. The catch is that EKS only exists in AWS. Organisations that need to run Kubernetes on bare metal, in a colocation facility, or in a disconnected environment have historically had two options: accept the operational overhead of a self-managed K8s distribution, or forgo the tooling ecosystem entirely.
Spinifex adds a third option. It implements the EKS API on your own hardware, so the CLI commands, Terraform configs, and IAM patterns that work in AWS work identically on bare metal.
What Spinifex EKS actually does
When you call aws eks create-cluster against Spinifex, the platform provisions a managed control plane inside a Spinifex-managed VM, places it behind a Network Load Balancer so the Kubernetes API is reachable at a stable endpoint, and configures it to authenticate via the same API access-entry model that AWS EKS uses. There is no separate etcd cluster to manage and no control plane nodes to monitor, because Spinifex handles that layer exactly as AWS does.
