[yebyen]

You're paying for master nodes with StackPoint, right? Each droplet you start has the same cost structure whether it's running your "user-land" slave workloads or if it's there just for running your cluster.

The big payoff (for small clusters like mine anyway) is that masters won't be charged, like other managed Kubernetes offerings from Azure and Google. I don't know enough about StackPoint to compare it to a service I haven't even seen in beta yet, but I can tell you that much.

I know that StackPoint is supposed to be "like a managed" experience. Maybe one of the DigitalOcean guys who has been responding in this thread can speak to the technical details of the new offering.

[Rotareti]

> You're paying for master nodes with StackPoint, right?

No, you pay a monthly subscription (starting at 50$/month). The service allows you to create/update clusters easily. I'm not sure, but I think you can create as many clusters as you want with a 50$ subscription (at least I never hit a limit). The procedure to create a new cluster looks something like this, if you use the web interface:

* click "add cluster"

* select cloud provider (DO, AWS, GKE, etc.)

* configure master nodes. E.g.: 2 master nodes @ 2G Ram, running in region NYC1.

* configure worker nodes. (same procedure as with master nodes)

* submit

If you choose DO, you get a cluster that works with DO load-balancers, DO block-storage, etc out of the box.

If a new version of Kubernetes is released, you can hit the "update cluster" button.

They have an API for all the stuff too.

I chose StackPoint in combination with DO, because it felt least bloated and least locking-in.

Now that DO introduces the Kubernetes service, I can imagine that I won't need the StackPoint subscription any more.

[yebyen]

That's very interesting, thanks for sharing. $50/mo is a bit for a hobbyist, but not much if you're operating at any serious kind of scale!

But I mean, in addition to the StackPoint subscription, you do also pay for the master node droplets when you use it, as well as paying for the worker droplets, right? You won't be paying for those masters anymore with the managed offering, from any of the cloud vendors I've heard of announcing a managed offering. I have to imagine this is because they can do (or plan to do) multi-tenant APIs under the hood.

(Even if you get a pool of worker nodes and the pool is on machines that are exclusively yours, it seems unlikely that your constellation of masters is ever going to be exclusively yours unless your bill says "dedicated masters" and you've paid something for it... and that's fine, as long as it's done right! I obviously can't afford to give myself as many masters as a multi-tenant system can allocate a share on for me. We will all wind up getting more resilient systems out of the deal, and for much cheaper, in this arrangement I think.)

I'm definitely signing up for this preview, I hope it will include an API for creating/upgrading/tearing down clusters! I can't imagine it will do anything but obsolete StackPoint for DigitalOcean customers.

Then again, maybe the bigger value provided by StackPoint is actually that you can take this K8S cluster orchestrator with you to a different cloud if you need to move. It is obviously going to be a harder sell though, when all of the major vendors are coming out with their own managed k8s offerings that enable cost savings. Next to $50/mo, enough masters to make your cluster resilient against localized failures on a 24/7 basis are... pretty costly, right?

It's really going to come down to, are the managed offerings as good, better, etc than the ones you can install yourself with a tool like kops (or are they as good as the ones that a service such as StackPoint can help you install for yourself?)

I wonder, did you try installing Kubernetes for yourself before you tried StackPoint? If so, what distro(s) did you try and which ones did or didn't make the cut?

[Rotareti]

> But I mean, in addition to the StackPoint subscription, you do also pay for the master node droplets when you use it, as well as paying for the worker droplets, right?

Yes, you pay for all of them, but therefor you get full control of the entire cluster.

> You won't be paying for those masters anymore with the managed offering, from any of the cloud vendors I've heard of announcing a managed offering.

Interesting, I didn't know about that. Not sure if I prefer this though. Might be another "surface" for the cloud providers to lock you in.

> It's really going to come down to, are the managed offerings as good, better, etc than the ones you can install yourself with a tool like kops (or are they as good as the ones that a service such as StackPoint can help you install for yourself?)

I guess things around kubernetes will slow down soon (hopefully) and I'll probably switch to something like kops/playbooks/etc. But right now things are still moving too fast for my taste, so I'm happy to abstract away as much as possible.

> I wonder, did you try installing Kubernetes for yourself before you tried StackPoint? If so, what distro(s) did you try and which ones did or didn't make the cut?

Yes, I experimented with different approaches for Kubernetes, Openshift and Rancher and I tested several cloud providers. In the end I found it wasn't worth the effort to learn and configure the whole thing from the ground up, since everything was constantly changing, like I said. Even if you have your cluster ready there is still a lot of work to be done for the deployment pipelines, cluster backups, etc.. For now I'm happy that creating/destroying a cluster is a matter of hitting a button, but I'm also excited to see what the future brings. Kubernetes is definitely one of the most amazing projects I've come across so far.

[yebyen]

> > You won't be paying for those masters anymore with the managed offering, from any of the cloud vendors I've heard of announcing a managed offering.

> Interesting, I didn't know about that. Not sure if I prefer this though. Might be another "surface" for the cloud providers to lock you in.

If you want a serious HA-FT kubernetes cluster that is spread across and resilient against failures in a single AZ, and you don't have something like Stackpoint or a managed K8S offering to configure it for you, there is a pretty serious amount of work (and decent number of computers required) in order for you to get your cluster there.

That being said, I don't know how many "hosted, managed" K8S offerings there really are in GA right now to compare.

I'm counting GKE on GCP, AKS on Azure, IBM's new managed k8s offering, AWS/EKS (which is still in preview) and Digital Ocean's offering announced yesterday (which is still pre-beta.) As far as I know, all of those offerings will give you as many masters as you need to make a resilient cluster for free, and you only pay for the workers.

(Except for the offerings that are in preview mode, then I guess you just don't pay for any of it for now...)

> Platform - Certified Kubernetes - Hosted (21)

I guess there are also quite a few I haven't looked at yet. Those are just the platforms with hosted offerings.

https://www.cncf.io/certification/software-conformance/

I personally used kubeadm for my toy-sized single node cluster, and it's great, but I'm also still on 1.5!