1. Why Private Cloud Is Making a Comeback in 2026
Interest in building a private cloud has surged among enterprises over the past few years. One trigger is Broadcom's licensing overhaul following its acquisition of VMware: perpetual licenses have been discontinued in favor of subscriptions, and mid-size companies report annual costs jumping 3 to 4 times what they paid before the acquisition (EnterpriseZine). Gartner projects that by 2028, roughly 35% of enterprise-scale VMware workloads will migrate to other environments — this is not a temporary blip.
At the same time, rising public cloud costs and tightening data sovereignty regulations are pushing companies to reconsider bringing infrastructure back in-house. In fact, OpenStack's global compute core count grew 350% over five years, from 10 million cores in 2018 to 45 million in 2023, and new adoption continues even 13 years after the project's founding (OpenStack official blog).
Given this backdrop, it's natural for both engineers and executives to think, "Why not just build our own private cloud again?" Technically, that's entirely possible. The real question is whether the Day 2 operations that follow have been fully accounted for.
2. What It Actually Means to Build "Your Own Cloud" with OpenStack × Kubernetes (K3s)
The first thing worth understanding is that Kubernetes and OpenStack are not competing technologies — they serve different roles. Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform, while OpenStack is a "cloud platform" that abstracts hardware resources through virtual machines (Red Hat). Combining the two lets you run OpenStack's individual services (Nova, Neutron, Cinder, and others) as containerized workloads on Kubernetes, giving OpenStack itself cloud-native operational traits such as rolling updates and self-healing.
The lightweight Kubernetes distribution most often chosen as this foundation is K3s. K3s is a fully conformant Kubernetes packaged as a single binary under 100MB, requiring nothing more than a modern kernel and cgroup mounts to run (K3s official documentation). The lightweight design built for edge environments and homelabs turns out to be equally well suited as the foundation for a self-managed OpenStack deployment.
With just a handful of servers, deploying OpenStack-Helm on a K3s cluster lets you stand up "your own private cloud" — compute, network, and storage all included — in far less time than you might expect. For most infrastructure engineers, getting this far is not a particularly high bar.
3. The Hidden Costs Lurking in Day 2 Operations
The real challenge begins after the build. Running OpenStack in-house on a 24/7 basis typically requires at least two people on call at all times, which translates to roughly ten full-time-equivalent staff per year in practice. Based on average salaries for cloud operations engineers, that personnel cost alone comes to more than $700,000 annually, on top of separate support costs. Managed OpenStack services, by contrast, are sometimes offered at a fixed per-host rate, and beyond a certain scale can end up more economical than self-managed operations (Ubuntu official blog).
Operators in the field also point to upgrade complexity and the operational burden on small teams as recurring pain points. The share of deployments running within the five most recent releases improved from 72% in 2022 to 81% in 2023, but nearly one in five deployments still remains stuck on outdated versions (OpenStack official blog).
Adding AI workloads only compounds the complexity. Dedicated GPU scheduling and node pool optimization, separating training and inference infrastructure, tiered storage design with Ceph, and securing tenant isolation and network segmentation are just some of the considerations cited as 2026 best practices (VEXXHOST). Continuously keeping up with all of this as a small in-house team is no small burden.
Given this operational reality, it's a natural next step to wonder whether that operational overhead could instead be handed off to a K3s-based managed service. Kubo is built on K3s while exposing the standard Kubernetes API as-is — a "Pure Kubernetes" approach — and its AI-Driven Deployment significantly reduces the burden of initial setup.
4. A Decision Framework: Build In-House or Go Managed?
As we've seen, "can we build it" and "can we keep running it" are two separate questions. Even analyses comparing the cost and performance of running Kubernetes on a private cloud against EKS and GKE emphasize the importance of evaluating total cost across the entire operational phase, not just initial build costs (OpenMetal). Making costs "visible" with tooling doesn't make the underlying operational effort disappear.
The real fork in the decision comes down to whether data sovereignty and air-gapped requirements are truly mandatory.
- For financial institutions, healthcare/pharma, government agencies, and others where full self-management or air-gapped operation is mandatory: the choice narrows to building in-house or adopting a fully managed on-premise option. This is where Kubo On-Premise is worth considering — it lets you retain data sovereignty on your own infrastructure while gaining predictable TCO through fixed licensing and standard Kubernetes operations free of vendor lock-in.
- When the priority is cost efficiency or reducing operational burden: rather than forcing a self-built OpenStack deployment, using a K3s-based managed Kubernetes service like Kubo Cloud can substantially compress the cost of Day 2 operations.
Either way, the key is to estimate total cost of ownership — including Day 2 operations — before you build, rather than building first and discovering the problems later. If you're unsure which path fits your requirements, you can get in touch for a free consultation tailored to your needs.
5. Conclusion
The claim that "you can build your own private cloud" is technically true in some respects. Combining OpenStack and K3s lets you stand up a genuine private cloud environment from just a handful of servers. But that's only the entry point.
The real question is whether your team can sustain the 24/7 monitoring, frequent upgrades, security patching, and GPU workload support that Day 2 operations demand. With momentum building toward on-premise infrastructure amid rising VMware licensing costs, the question isn't "can we build it" but "can we keep building it" — and that's the lens through which to weigh in-house builds against managed services.
You no longer have to put up with the high cost, complexity, and vendor lock-in of EKS or AKS. With K3s-based Kubo, you get the full power of standard Kubernetes with dramatically better cost efficiency. Start by comparing pricing plans to find the option that fits your workloads.