[hn_throwaway_99]

Not sure what size a "very small company" size is, but I'm just curious as to why you chose GKE. I make tech decisions for a (probably) much smaller company, and I found things like App Engine Flexible Environment, Cloud Run and Cloud Functions let me do much of the stuff I can do with k8s but with much, much less complexity (at least on my side of things). The main factor is that I don't have a full-time infrastructure expert, and my experience in the past is that k8s essentially requires that.

[atombender]

We have about 200 long-running pods right now. On Cloud Run, that would cost us more than $12,000 in CPU alone, and that's excluding memory and request costs.

That also excludes stateful apps like Elasticsearch that would not be able to run on Cloud Run. Not sure what Google product is appropriate there.

[Glyptodon]

So let's say you have a small pile of apps that are all <app_server>, <redis>, <jobqueue/workers>, <db>, <frontend>, but not all the same DB, language, etc. They're all low traffic and you want to automate/simplify and containerize them. On developer machines docker compose works great, but you need to deploy in a cloud provider. What are choice do you have other than K8s?

[nostrebored]

AWS Lambda with SAM local?

[atombender]

Less than 15 employees. Several products, two teams, <= 20 nodes.

We migrated our stuff from DigitalOcean around 2018. At the time, we briefly toyed with the notion of self-hosting Kubernetes on DO, but it's complex to manage, and we don't have any dedicated ops staff. GKE is significantly easier to manage.

At that time we migrated, the things you mentioned weren't available/mature, I think. Even today, I'd choose Kubernetes over a complex mishmash of different systems. I like the unified, extensible ops model. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I wish all of GCP could be managed as Kubernetes objects.

[briangrant]

Re. managing GCP as Kubernetes resources: https://cloud.google.com/config-connector/docs/overview

[atombender]

That's very cool, thanks! Note that this allows selectively creating Kubernetes resources backed by GCP resources. Looks like it will not automatically sync everything that already exists, which seems like a missed opportunity.

[praveenperera]

But DigitalOcean has managed K8s now: https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/

[atombender]

DigitalOcean did not have Kubernetes then. Are you suggesting we should spend 6-12 man months migrating back?

[tie_]

How about contracting an ops-oriented person for a month that would do the migration for you? Where do those cost functions intersect?

[atombender]

Would never happen. Just the amount of time needed to dedicate to onboarding a temporary contractor would be really disruptive to the developers, not to mention the disruptive effect of the technical migration — databases to move over, persistent volumes to copy, DNS to repoint, lots of downtime, etc. There's a good reason companies don't switch clouds often.

[tie_]

If it takes more than a month to migrate a 20-node K8s cluster, then that's a red flag. Too much tech debt or a strong vendor lock-in? Either deserves attention.

[praveenperera]

No my mistake DOKS came out late 2018.

I had been using it since May 2018 but it didn't come out of early access till December.

[giovannibonetti]

Indeed, for small apps that average 2 instances or less during the month it's now cheaper to run App Engine Flex than GKE. Each instance costs about US$ 50/month in US central.

For those that are not aware, App Engine Flex runs services based on Docker containers with autoscaling similarly to Kubernetes. It has way less features than GKE, but if you are just running a standard app that only needs to connect to a database that is more than enough.

Bonus points: you can have multiple services, like back-end and front-end and make them available in the same subdomain - to avoid CORS problems. You can also host your front-end for almost nothing with App Engine Standard. It has an awesome CDN built-in if you know how to use it.