On kind 14,561 you are the cloud provider: you created the nodes, and the control plane is a container you can delete. In production most teams rent the control plane instead. Amazon Elastic Kubernetes 5,150 Service (EKS 24 ), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE 1 ) and Azure 6 Kubernetes Service (AKS 6 ) run the API server, etcd 137,357 , the scheduler and the controller managers (The Control Plane) on the provider's machines, patch and back them up, and hand you a kubeconfig. Their cloud controller manager (The Cloud Controller Manager) turns a LoadBalancer Service into a real load balancer; your manifests apply unchanged.
This book has no cloud account, so creating these clusters is not run here: the commands come from each provider's documentation, and prices and version dates were read from the providers' pricing and release pages on 26 September 2026 (US dollars, cheapest regions).