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Kubespray runs on bare metal and most clouds, using Ansible as its substrate for
provisioning and orchestration. [Kops](https://github.com/kubernetes/kops) performs the provisioning and orchestration
itself, and as such is less flexible in deployment platforms. For people with
familiarity with Ansible, existing Ansible deployments or the desire to run a
Kubernetes cluster across multiple platforms, Kubespray is a good choice. Kops,
however, is more tightly integrated with the unique features of the clouds it
supports so it could be a better choice if you know that you will only be using
one platform for the foreseeable future.
[Kubeadm](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubeadm) provides domain Knowledge of Kubernetes clusters' life cycle
management, including self-hosted layouts, dynamic discovery services and so
on. Had it belonged to the new [operators world](https://coreos.com/blog/introducing-operators.html),
it may have been named a "Kubernetes cluster operator". Kubespray however,
does generic configuration management tasks from the "OS operators" ansible
world, plus some initial K8s clustering (with networking plugins included) and
Kubespray has started using `kubeadm` internally for cluster creation since v2.3
in order to consume life cycle management domain knowledge from it
and offload generic OS configuration things from it, which hopefully benefits both sides.