How does it compare to kops or, dare I say it, kubespray?

Hi, I've often worked in corporate environments where it wasn't necessarily allowed to spin up a VPC, or to create an internet gateway. In the time I was creating this, many companies who are in healthcare or are otherwise locked down, could not use kops due to its requirement for an internet gateway. I created keights to fill that space, so that anyone could run Kubernetes in AWS, even in air gapped environments. This is pretty common nowadays, by the way - enterprises have a team to manage all AWS accounts, and they set up VPCs and connectivity ahead of time, before development teams get access to the account; access to the internet is through a proxy only, and no one can modify the network. Not to mention, most of the access to Amazon's services can now be done without an internet gateway, using VPC endpoints. Keights fits well in this world of locked down network access, and it works well even in GovCloud (you would need to build the AMI there as my public AMIs cannot be shared with GovCloud accounts).

Keights and Kubespray both use Ansible, however they do it in a very different way. (Disclaimer: I haven't used kubespray, only looked over the documentation). Keights uses Ansible roles to build CloudFormation stacks to produce a cluster. The nodes in the cluster bootstrap themselves using systemd services that are baked into the AMI; Ansible does not run on the nodes in the cluster. Kubespray, as I understand it, uses a traditional Ansible approach of pushing configurations over ssh to nodes in its inventory. To my knowledge, it does not actually build the machines in the cluster, it just configures existing machines. Keights does the full end-to-end automation to bring up a working cluster, including the creation of all required AWS resources (autoscaling groups, a load balancer for the apiserver, security groups, etc - though you do provide certain resources as parameters, for example your VPC ID and subnet IDs, due to the aforementioned requirements to fit into locked-down environments).