Provider Comparison

Purpose: For platform engineers, explains the GA provider choices, their trade-offs, and the explicit non-GA boundaries.

Quick Recommendation

If you need...	Choose...
Fully automated private-cloud provisioning	OpenStack
Existing vSphere investment and pre-provisioned VMs	VMware
Local development or CI clusters	Kind
Physical hosts you already manage	Baremetal

GA Provider Matrix

Provider	Status	Provisioning Model	Drift Detection	Best Fit
OpenStack	GA	Automated	Detect + limited reconcile	Production private cloud
VMware	GA	Pre-provisioned VMs	Detect only	Existing enterprise virtualization
Kind	GA for local/dev	Built-in local runtime	Not applicable	Workstations and CI
Baremetal	GA	Pre-provisioned hosts	Not applicable	Existing physical estates

Capability Summary

Capability	OpenStack	VMware	Kind	Baremetal
Production support	Yes	Yes	Local/dev only	Yes
Air-gap friendly	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Infrastructure ownership	openCenter-managed cloud resources	Infrastructure team owns VM lifecycle	Local runtime	Infrastructure team owns hardware and OS lifecycle
Storage path	Cinder CSI	vSphere CSI	Local development storage	External storage or platform-selected storage

Planned / Non-GA Infrastructure Providers

AWS is not part of the GA infrastructure-provider story. AWS-backed service integrations can still be used where platform services depend on them, but AWS should not be treated as a supported GA cluster-provisioning target.

GCP and Azure also remain outside the documented GA provider surface.

Naming and Compatibility

• Use vmware in all new configuration, examples, and documentation.
• Existing vsphere values continue to load as a compatibility alias.

Support Boundary

GA support assumes Linux control-plane nodes and Linux workers. Windows worker-node content remains informational only and should not be treated as a supported deployment target.