We ran our project on Google's K8s for $76 a month for quite a while. They provide one free Master. There is no way, EVER, that I would host K8s myself for the size of the projects I usually work on. But having a panic in one of my services at 1am, and K8s auto-restarting the pod is amazing. Namespaces even let us run three separate environments for that same $76. We have a couple thousand users per day who are in the app all day, so not a large project. We use other services like GCP Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub, PostgreSQL, etc. that require next to no setup. We are up to 3 nodes in our small cluster and still costing us less than $350 a month.

K8s is repetitive. You create one YAML for a service and the rest are similar. Rolling releases are a simple script. As small as our company and product is, I think K8s has been one of our best decisions.

Some things like MongoDB can quickly triple your costs though. We were able to pick technologies that kept the cost really low and stack maintainable.

I find those solutions end up being harder once you have to integrate something new you didn't know you needed. And the cost, at least for something like Heroku, is MORE than using something like GKE where I don't need a new dyno for every service. I consider GKE (and DO's and AWS's equivalent k8s solutions) on the same platform level as a fly.io/Heroku/etc.

Exactly! I chose k8s managed by Google years ago. As a solo developer you can have a cluster up and running with a web server, fronted by a Google LB with Google managed certificates in under an hour. Just follow one of the hundred tutorials. Just as quick and easy as setting up a single VM. But that really isn't the point is it. If that is all I needed, yes I'd use a $10 VPS. But for an "application", not a web site, you always need more.

My k8s "cluster" is a single node that doesn't cost me any more than a VM would. I don't need the scalability at the moment. But I do need different environments for dev, qa, and prod. And all three are running identically next to each other using Namespaces. Saved us a ton of maintenance and cost.

Any project that grows has its needs change. GKE gives you a ton of integrated tools right from the start including logging, alerting, metrics, easy access to hosted databases, pub/sub, object storage, easy and automatic network setup, easy firewall setup, dns management, and a lot more. k8s is no different than using any other hosted service. It provides a great set of features that you configure using fairly consistent yaml configuration files. And it is all accessible from the web based "Google Console" as well.

Learning the k8s yaml format and some basic kubectl commands is all you need to get going and it saves a TON of time that can go back into developing your application rather than dealing with configuring disparate pieces with their own configuration methods.

I was fairly early to k8s while they were still competing with other similar solutions and other tools like Puppet and Chef. I tested all of them and truthfully, k8s was the easiest to learn, implement, and maintain my app with. Using GKE of course. I would NEVER as a one man or even small team of developers take on managing an installation of k8s myself.

I've always wondered why no Democrat running for president hasn't come up with an idea like this. Why not make Medicare for All cover everything coded as Preventive Care and your private insurance covers everything else. We already have the coding guidelines in place since private insurance doesn't charge a copay for Preventive Care items. Uninsured get something and private insurance only has to worry about the true catastrophe costs.