OVHcloud Kubernetes Review: Europe's Quiet Powerhouse
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kubernetes ovhcloud review hands-on opentofu<br>OVHcloud Kubernetes Review: Europe's Quiet Powerhouse<br>Hands-on review of OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes. Free control plane, mature vRack networking, API IP restrictions, and solid OpenTofu support. Full breakdown with IaC code.
MR
Michael Raeck
Mar 6, 2026<br>14 min read
OVHcloud is one of Europe’s largest cloud providers, headquartered in France and operating data centers across Europe. They’ve been around since 1999 and have built a reputation for competitive pricing and data sovereignty - though not without scars. In March 2021, a fire destroyed their SBG2 data center in Strasbourg, taking down 120,000+ services and causing permanent data loss for customers who didn’t have off-site backups. It was a wake-up call for the entire industry. OVH responded with a hyper-resilience plan, rebuilt the site as SBG5 with proper fire compartmentalization, and made multi-AZ a first-class concept across their product line. You’ll notice their console prominently shows the AZ deployment mode on basically every resource - that’s not by accident.
I recently deployed a Managed Kubernetes cluster there and was pleasantly surprised: this is a mature, reliable offering that doesn’t get enough attention. Here’s my full breakdown.
What I Tested
Control Plane : Free tier (managed by OVH)
Nodes : 3x D2-8 (4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 50 GB NVMe SSD)
Region : GRA9 (Gravelines, France), 1-AZ for this test
Kubernetes Version : 1.34 (OVH supports 1.30-1.34, you choose at cluster creation)
Networking : Private vRack with separate node and load balancer subnets
Automation : OpenTofu with the official OVH provider
OVHcloud offers two cluster tiers: Free (1-AZ, shared control plane, 99.5% SLA) and Standard (3-AZ, dedicated control plane, 99.99% SLA target). I tested the Free tier to see how far you can get at zero control plane cost. For production with high availability requirements, the Standard plan gives you multi-AZ distribution.
Total estimated cost: ~€87.75/month (3x €25.92/node + €9.99 LoadBalancer). Control plane is free.
A note on the D2 flavor choice: OVHcloud gives you $200 free credit when you create a new Public Cloud project. The D2-8 nodes are their burstable tier - not what you’d pick for CPU-intensive production, but they let you run a proper 3-node HA cluster for roughly a month without spending a cent. I wanted to see how far the free tier goes, and the answer is: surprisingly far. For production, you’d step up to the B2 or C2 general-purpose flavors.
The cluster runs ArgoCD for GitOps, Velero for backups to OVH S3, Traefik as ingress, and IP-restricted API access - all provisioned through a single OpenTofu repo.
The Good
It Just Works
This is the headline. I provisioned the cluster, the nodes came up, the control plane was responsive, and everything worked as expected. No stuck provisioning, no mysterious errors, no support tickets needed. After testing providers like Infomaniak where nodes wouldn’t come up and storage topped out at 500 IOPS, OVHcloud was refreshingly boring - in the best way.
Three nodes, all Ready, running v1.34.2. That’s what I want to see.
Free Control Plane
OVHcloud doesn’t charge for the Kubernetes control plane. You only pay for worker nodes and add-on infrastructure (load balancers, storage). A D2-8 node (4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 50 GB NVMe) runs €25.92/month (€0.0355/hour), with the Octavia load balancer adding €9.99/month.
The console shows “Free” right there in the plan column. For comparison, that’s roughly half of what you’d pay for equivalent compute on most hyperscalers. See the full breakdown on our OVHcloud pricing page.
Proper Private Networking (vRack)
OVHcloud’s vRack technology gives you real private networking. You define separate subnets for nodes and load balancers, and traffic between nodes stays internal. This isn’t some overlay hack - it’s actual network isolation backed by OVH’s physical infrastructure.
In my setup, nodes live on 10.0.0.0/24 and load balancers on 10.0.1.0/24. The load balancer subnet needs a gateway so it can route public traffic, while the node subnet stays fully internal.
API Server IP Restrictions
OVHcloud doesn’t offer a built-in VPN like AWS PrivateLink. But they offer something arguably more pragmatic: API server IP restrictions .
You define which CIDR ranges can talk to your Kubernetes API. Everyone else gets rejected. This is managed as a first-class Terraform resource (ovh_cloud_project_kube_iprestrictions), which means you can automate it and rotate IPs as needed.
Is it the same as a full VPN? No. But for many teams, it’s sufficient - and far simpler to manage. I’ve been running with this for weeks now and it works exactly as expected.
Excellent OpenTofu / Terraform Support
The official OVH Terraform provider is mature and well-maintained (v2.11 at time of writing). It covers clusters, node pools, networking, storage,...