Partners · Managed service providers
A managed service provider that runs Kubernetes for its customers carries the distribution's licence in every proposal. Priced per core, that licence is frequently the largest line, and it grows each time the customer adds capacity. BKE is licensed at a flat fee per cluster, and the Mamluk Enterprise Helm Charts supply the production data services, so more of the customer's budget remains for the work you bill.
The problem
Enterprise Kubernetes distributions are commonly licensed per core or per vCPU. For a customer with separate production, staging and test clusters, the annual subscription can reach hundreds of thousands of US dollars, and it is fixed before an hour of engineering has been priced.
The customer reads the proposal as one figure. When the subscription takes most of it, the operations, migration and advisory work are what the customer reduces, and the provider's own services become the smallest line in its own proposal.
A per-core subscription also grows with the customer. Every worker added and every disaster-recovery site is a further licence increment, and it is priced into the next renewal rather than into the provider's services.
The arithmetic
A worked example: a regulated bank running production, staging and performance testing in 3 clusters, on 320 worker cores in total.
| Platform | Per year | Over 3 years |
|---|---|---|
| OpenShift, 320 worker cores at an assumed USD 1,850 per core | USD 592,000 | USD 1,776,000 |
| BKE for 3 clusters, the Enterprise Helm Charts, and support with a four-hour response time | USD 156,000 | USD 468,000 |
| Difference | USD 436,000 | USD 1,308,000 |
The OpenShift rate is an assumption: a heavily discounted figure, including Red Hat’s support subscription, used because OpenShift is negotiated per customer and no list price applies to any particular one. Substitute the per-core rate from a real quote and multiply it by 320; the BKE figures do not depend on it. Hardware and staff are excluded from both sides. The full example, with each arrangement and the cost of growth, is on the BKE site.
On the assumed rate, OpenShift costs 3.8 times as much. The difference does not shrink as the estate grows: a further worker core adds to a per-core subscription every year, and adds nothing to a BKE licence, which is USD 12,000 per cluster whatever its size.
For a managed service provider, that difference is budget the customer has already approved for its platform. Spent on a per-core subscription, it leaves the provider's estate. With a flat licence, it is available for operations, migration, capacity and advisory work delivered by your own engineers.
What changes
The distribution is a known, flat figure per cluster. The remainder of the budget is the engineering you deliver, and the customer can see it as such.
Adding workers or cores to a cluster does not change its licence. A new cluster, such as a disaster-recovery site, adds one flat fee.
With the Enterprise Helm Charts, the customer receives production-ready MySQL, Valkey and message brokers with replication, backups and upgrade paths decided. Your engineers operate those services rather than building them.
BKE classifies every release by blast radius. A patch release never drains a node, and a version jump that is not adjacent is refused rather than attempted, which matters when one team upgrades many customers' clusters.
BKE runs no Mamluk control plane in the customer's data path. If a licence lapses or Mamluk is unreachable, the cluster continues to serve traffic, and only installation and upgrades pause.
BKE runs on ordinary amd64 or arm64 servers under Debian, virtualised or bare metal, in the customer's data centre or in yours. Debian carries no operating-system subscription.
What partners work with
Upstream Kubernetes and upstream components, with no fork and no proprietary resource types. Licensed at a flat USD 12,000 per cluster per year, whatever the number of nodes, cores or memory, with every component included.
Production-ready MySQL, Valkey, message brokers and more, with replication, backups and upgrade paths already decided. They are the charts that run the managed services on bahriya.cloud, licensed per organisation for on-premise use.
BKE and the charts are supported by the engineers who develop them, from within the GCC. Support with a four-hour response time and Kubernetes support contracts are available on top of the standard support included with a licence.
A 14-day trial licence is issued from the Mamluk console and installs the complete distribution. The documentation and the node requirements are published in full.
The commercial terms of each partnership are agreed directly with the partner.
Questions
A flat licence, and more of the budget for your work.