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While Managed Kubernetes in the cloud (like AWS EKS or Google GKE) is incredibly popular, many organizations have strict compliance, data sovereignty, or cost requirements that force them to run Kubernetes in their own private data centers. This is known as running Kubernetes On-Premises (Bare Metal).
Running Kubernetes on-premises is significantly harder than using a managed cloud service. In the cloud, if you need a Load Balancer or a persistent block storage volume, you simply create a Service of type LoadBalancer or a PersistentVolumeClaim, and the cloud provider provisions the hardware automatically.
On bare metal, Kubernetes does not come with a built-in load balancer or default storage class. You must implement these yourself!
Since you don't have AWS ELB, you must install MetalLB into your cluster. MetalLB provides a network load balancer implementation for Kubernetes clusters that do not run on a supported cloud provider, allowing you to use standard LoadBalancer services.
You will heavily rely on Ingress Controllers (like NGINX Ingress) to route HTTP/S traffic from the outside world into your cluster via a single entry point (usually exposed via NodePort or MetalLB).
For persistent storage, you cannot use AWS EBS. You must use distributed storage solutions like Rook (Ceph) or Longhorn, which aggregate the local hard drives of your physical servers into a unified, redundant storage pool for your Pods.
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