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Comment by olafure | Hacker News Reader

$3600/year is significant for a startup on a shoestring budget.

Then manage k8s yourself.

Or, better yet, don't use k8s. You don't need it, especially as a startup on a shoestring budget. You can migrate later if you decide you really need to, but just a plain LAMP gets you 99% of the way.

But then you can’t put k8s on you resume for when said startup implodes.

If there were a lower complexity way to deploy containerized apps supported widely I think tons of people would go for it. Currently there's not really much of a middle ground between Cloud Run and K8s offered. It's kind of absurd, honestly.

Google App Engine has been exactly this since 2008.

My impression of app engine is that you have to use all the cloud* services like SQL, cache, etc, which will make it significantly more expensive, even if it does that app layer fine. Is that wrong?

It's wrong today. It was true in 2008, when GAE was Google's entire cloud offering (and there was no Docker or K8s).

Around the time "Google Cloud Platform" became a thing, Google changed GAE from an encapsulated bubble into a basic frontend management system that interacts with normal services through public APIs (either inside or outside GCP). It's more expensive than GCE, but it's fully managed and lets you skip the devops team.

So ask for Google cloud for startups? One free cluster is enough to get started.

> Google Cloud for Startups is designed to help companies that are backed by VCs, incubators, or accelerators, so it's less applicable for small businesses, services, consultancies, and dev shops.[1]

This makes it seem like Google Cloud for Startups is aimed at startups that aren't really on a shoestring budget.

[1]: https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/

Like every "special offer for startups", it's a vulture waiting for funding round to close.

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