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Comment by rhacker | Hacker News Reader

That's the exact same feeling I get too. If I'm a mom/pop shop online, why can't I get a k8s cluster w/just 1 machine for $5/month? I mean the big three (4 w DO) can all get you a bare machine for $5/mo that can run Docker. Why not give the k8s management side for free for those people?

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You can get a small cluster from Digital Ocean pretty cheaply. It's more than $5 (I forget the exact price) but they'll provide a free master node and then you just pay for one additional kubelet (and you can add more as you need them). I have used it for one hobby project and have been pretty happy with it.

I'll have to check that out!

Same with Linode, the management machines are not massive scale HA control planes like you get with the expensive hosts (It seems like Linode may run a single 2GB droplet), but for most of my clusters I don't need it.

Because that's more the realm of:

https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/

https://www.scaleway.com/en/kubernetes-kapsule/

IaaS model is more 'everything is chargeable in small units', a free control plane doesn't really gel with that IMO, and also they have some huge users that it'd cost a lot to run the control plane for, pushing up the price of what you connect to it (or something must give) and making more PaaS-style like DO & Scaleway anyway.

If you're mom/pop online shop and just need 1 machine you don't need k8s. KISS principle applies.

Well, in this case the pop is me, and I know k8s but I don't want to invest 15-35 / month on a side project but would still rather have a decently managed site rather. I don't want to go back to FTP crap at this point.

A car is a hugely complicated machine and I'm sure in the 1910s people said only some people will ever need them. Bad analogy considering cars kill lots of people but take that part out :)

A ton of the value from k8s is in the programmatic and replicable configuration. 1 computer pets are still bad in a mom and pop shop. 1 computer livestock is still better.

Not to mention everything you have to do to get a machine to parity with Kubernetes--set up SSH, process management, monitoring, logging, etc. I don't think I'd go so far as to say Kubernetes is the right tool for this use case, but I certainly empathize with the sentiment.

Is “1 computer livestock” even possible?

After your single cattle is murdered, the next one has to be raised right?

State has to come from somewhere. Downtime has a cost for most businesses.

Downtime has cost.

But being able to blow away a k8s node and bring it back up in 2 minutes (or have k8s auto-spawn a replacement node) is WAY faster than having to reinstall wordpress, reinstall nginx, set IP addresses, fiddle with your DNS, restore a database from a backup, etc, etc, etc.

In this case the state can come from a centrally managed k8s controller. Something that most cloud providers provide and have good SLAs on.

Kubernetes just makes that story so much simpler. Heck a good cloud provider can just handle any machines fucking up automatically without any human intervention on your side.

The same can't be said for a single machine.

so... for a small cluster then it's like aws beanstalk, right? rolling deployments, load balancing, etc. all for free.

From my experience, deploying to a k8s cluster managed by someone else is extremely simple and straightforward. Tell it which container to run and off it goes. You get zero-downtime rolling deploys, automatic restarts on crashes, easy rollbacks, service discovery (if you have multiple services) and more for free.

Managing a cluster is the tricky part of k8s but just running your stuff on an existing cluster is extremely straightforward. I could definitely see the attraction of a cheap managed k8s cluster with a single node. Maybe hosted k3s or something.

You can run a single-core preemptible instance on GKE for $7/month. As long as you keep the one instance alive that persists the cluster.

Get the zonal cluster on GKE. Free control plane stuff. Then you can put as many or as few nodes as you want on it.

Make sure to use metal LB or all your ingresses will be served with Google LBs that are hecka expensive.

You can with digital ocean

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