What's the cheapest you can run a k8s cluster in the cloud? I've been looking to spin one up in AWS, but it looks remarkably expensive for running personal projects.
If you go with a provider that provides the control plane for free, which is the way Google Cloud and Digital Ocean do it (and probably many others), a single node cluster is actually a valid cluster. It won't have redundancy / High Availability which is Kubernetes' raison d'être, but it works well. If so, Kubernetes is no more expensive than non-Kubernetes. In the case of Digital Ocean, $10/month.
Ignorant HA requirements, will this work fine with a single beefy node in home network or would I be better off running multiple vms on that single server which then run separate Kubernetes nodes?
You can get a single-node k8s cluster running super easily with [Minikube](https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube). The more recent Docker for windows/mac actually comes with a kubernetes distro that piggybacks off the docker vm.
Consider just running Minikube on your laptop. It’s pretty realistic and won’t cost you a penny. Except maybe in electricity, it seems to consume an enormous wattage just to exist...
K3s is fantastic. Lately I've been using K3d (which is the same thing, just in a docker container - much like Kind) It's super easy to spin up a cluster, and spin it back down with nothing really to clean up.
I’m building a startup that provides hosted, shared Kubernetes clusters starting for 0$/month. https://kubesail.com - I agree with everyone on this thread that using k8s for a blog is like building your own house from scratch - but the analogy breaks down when everything underneath the Kube api is managed and setup for you - at that point is just becomes a standard, open cloud API :)
I'm not very familiar with kubernetes, what do you get out of it that you don't with dokku? I really like dokku and use it on my personal server for all my half-baked personal projects.
If you just/first want to practice actual, multi-node k8s on your local Mac (or Windows), I've just completed this: https://github.com/youurayy/hyperctl