What is Free control plane?

A control plane is the layer that schedules and monitors your workloads, and in managed Kubernetes it is often billed apart from the nodes. AceCloud, Alibaba Cloud and Aruba Cloud all include a free control plane, so the bill covers compute rather than management. Amazon Web Services charges for its EKS control plane, as the EKS pricing page shows. For a small team, a free control plane removes a fixed monthly line item and makes total cost easier to predict, since only the nodes you run move the invoice.