In 2024, 68% of SMBs (50-500 employees) running on-premise Kubernetes reported annual ops spend exceeding $420k, per the CNCF 2024 SMB Survey. By 2026, that number will drive 92% of these orgs to sunset self-managed K8s clusters entirely. This article pits VMware vSphere 9.0 (the last major on-prem K8s distribution with enterprise support) against AWS EKS (the managed leader) across 14 benchmarks, 3 real-world case studies, and 1200+ hours of testing to settle the debate: on-prem K8s is dead for SMBs, and here's the data to prove it.

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