This isn’t true. I’ve provisioned 53 EKS clusters this week, and every one of them has been up in under 11 minutes with all of the accoutrements. I understand it has been substantially slower in the past.
You can spin up a local multi-node cluster using kind[0] in 1 minute on 6+ year old hardware. I know it's not the same but I really have to imagine there's ways to speed this up on the cloud. I haven't spun up a cluster on DO or Linode in a while, does anyone know how long it takes there for a comparison?
My Terraform scripts get a HA K3s cluster in Google Cloud VMs in less than 9 minutes, which in my opinion is fantastic.
I've worked on KIND and on clusters on clouds (at Google, but on multiple clouds) and both can be very quick, if anything there's still low hanging fruit to make KIND faster that I'd expect a production service with more staffing to handle.
KIND is Kubernetes, typically on much weaker hardware :-)
Within a few minutes is a perfectly reasonable expectation even for "real"-er clusters, see e.g. under 4 minutes:
- https://kubedex.com/google-gke-vs-azure-aks-automation-and-r...
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53839292/is-a-3-minute-g...