DevSpace Cloud provides Spaces which are fully managed Kubernetes namespaces. In comparison, managed Kubernetes provides entire Kubernetes clusters. The great thing about Spaces is that you do not have to worry about cluster provisioning and management. Just create Spaces for your applications and focus on what really matters: Building and deploying great applications.

You can access a Space on DevSpace Cloud exactly the same way as you would access any regular Kubernetes namespace. That means you can use kubectl, helm or any other tool to interact with your Spaces.

With DevSpace, you can create one Space for free. This Space can use a limited amount of cloud resources. If you need more Spaces or simply want to scale up your cloud power, you just pay for the resources you use. Using a managed Kubernetes cluster, you pay for the virtual machines / instances that you add as nodes to your cluster. Especially for smaller applications, it might be much more efficient to use Spaces instead of paying for an entire Kubernetes cluster.

Scaling a Space works out-of-the box. You simply deploy more pods or increase the resources for your containers and everything will work instantly and just as expected. Scaling a managed Kubernetes cluster can be much more complicated because you will need to configure cluster auto-scaling and define a template for your machine instances. Additionally, scaling an entire cluster is much slower than scaling Spaces because new virtual machines will need to be started and added to the managed Kubernetes cluster which takes time.

DevSpace Cloud provides pre-configured test domains (i.e. subdomains of .devspace.host) for your Spaces. Adding custom domains is a straight-forward as setting two DNS entries and clicking two buttons in the UI and DevSpace Cloud will handle all the configuration for you (e.g. defining ingresses). Adding domains to a managed Kubernetes involves a lot of manual tasks, e.g. ingress controller configuration, ingress definition, load balancer configuration,...

DevSpace Cloud automatically uses Letsencrypt to automatically generate SSL certificates for all your domains (even for custom domains). There is absolutely no configuration required. To add SSL to a managed Kubernetes cluster, in comparison, requires a lot of manual effort: manually generating certificates or installing a certificate manager, handling secrets, defining ingress resources,...