[jillesvangurp]

I think the number of containers rather than the number of machines should be the leading factor.

IMHO it makes sense for most setups that have multiple micro-services that need to interact with each other. A single node cluster running a single container is kind of pointless; I agree. And you are not going to run much more than that on a micro instance. So, I agree with the main point of the article that this probably is not an appropriate setup for any kind of home setup unless of course you really want to have kubernetes (which would be a valid reason for attempting this).

If you run multiple microservices you have most of the problems that kubernetes solves out of the box and attempting to solve those by manually gobbling together bits of infrastructure outweighs the financial overhead of running kubernetes. So any moderately small setup where you are in any case going to have 2 or 3 machines running multiple containers, you probably should be looking at kubernetes.

So, if you are in Google or amazon, hosted kubernetes is definitely worth considering. You probably want a loadbalancer as well. So, at that point you are looking at ~50-100+$ per month anyway for a couple of instances, a LB and whatever else you need (e.g. RDS, S3, etc).

For anything running commercially, that's entirely defensible. Yes you can run cheaper on bare metal but people tend to forget all the hours doing devops stuff are also cost you. A day of a competent dev will easily run you kubernetes for quite some time. Unless your devs are super bored, make them spend their hours on more valuable stuff than reinventing wheels.