Most cloud discussions tend to revolve around the large hyperscalers, but the cloud ecosystem is broader than Azure, AWS and Google Cloud. I recently had to deploy a project on IONOS Cloud, a platform I had little previous experience with, although I am comfortable working with Azure. IONOS is an established European cloud provider, offering infrastructure services with a strong focus on the European market.
The main tools and core services across cloud providers are similar, much like the Kubernetes concepts, which are the same everywhere. Yet the surrounding ecosystem, the CLI, the provider model, and the storage and networking defaults are different on every cloud. IONOS is no exception, and its documentation is thin. Details are either missing or spread across various pages. It took me a while to get a cluster up and a service reachable from the outside. Sharing what I learned about the IONOS services and their configuration might help others as well.
Here I explain how to provision a Managed Kubernetes cluster on IONOS and deploy a real workload onto it, with the handful of IONOS-specific details that are easy to miss. I’ll show two ways to create the infrastructure, the manual CLI and Terraform, and then the parts of the workload you have to adapt to the platform.
