But I mean, in addition to the StackPoint subscription, you do also pay for the master node droplets when you use it, as well as paying for the worker droplets, right? You won't be paying for those masters anymore with the managed offering, from any of the cloud vendors I've heard of announcing a managed offering. I have to imagine this is because they can do (or plan to do) multi-tenant APIs under the hood.

(Even if you get a pool of worker nodes and the pool is on machines that are exclusively yours, it seems unlikely that your constellation of masters is ever going to be exclusively yours unless your bill says "dedicated masters" and you've paid something for it... and that's fine, as long as it's done right! I obviously can't afford to give myself as many masters as a multi-tenant system can allocate a share on for me. We will all wind up getting more resilient systems out of the deal, and for much cheaper, in this arrangement I think.)

I'm definitely signing up for this preview, I hope it will include an API for creating/upgrading/tearing down clusters! I can't imagine it will do anything but obsolete StackPoint for DigitalOcean customers.

Then again, maybe the bigger value provided by StackPoint is actually that you can take this K8S cluster orchestrator with you to a different cloud if you need to move. It is obviously going to be a harder sell though, when all of the major vendors are coming out with their own managed k8s offerings that enable cost savings. Next to $50/mo, enough masters to make your cluster resilient against localized failures on a 24/7 basis are... pretty costly, right?

It's really going to come down to, are the managed offerings as good, better, etc than the ones you can install yourself with a tool like kops (or are they as good as the ones that a service such as StackPoint can help you install for yourself?)

I wonder, did you try installing Kubernetes for yourself before you tried StackPoint? If so, what distro(s) did you try and which ones did or didn't make the cut?