In my distributed and Cloud computing book the following are ways to manage a cluster:
guest-based manager- cluster manager resides on on a guest OS
host-based manager- supervises the guest systems and can restart guest system on another physical machine
3.independent cluster manager- management software is on both host and guest os
4.integrated cluster manager- manager must be designed to distinguish b/w virtualized resources and physical resources.
Which label most aptly fits K8?
None. All of those terms are related to Virtual Machines where there are strict borders between host and guest. While technically Kubernetes doesn’t require the use of containers, the overwhelming majority of users use Docker containers as the runtime where those boundaries are fuzzy. There is no guest OS, just some process flags.