[stickydink]

It's nice but, for the service, per-node pricing is frustrating. Maybe our workload is unusual, but I'm running something at a reasonably small scale, with about 30 nodes.

The cluster autoscaler has been so good that we've optimised for more, smaller nodes, on spot instance pricing. At $79/node, that's about 4x the cost of the actual instance itself...

And yet the actual cost of the services provided, don't _really_ seem to scale with number of nodes? But then, I can't think of another metric to tie it to easily

[kenm47]

the open source tool Polaris (what's quoted this article) is completely free to use. There is a commercial product (Fairwinds Insights) that includes Polaris among many other tools that costs 79$/node...

(disclaimer, I work at fairwinds)

[bbrennan]

Agreed per-node pricing is not ideal, but it appears to be an industry standard - most k8s tooling charges per node.

Since different clusters have different node profiles (in terms of size, scaling, etc), we offer discounts on per-node pricing when customers have a large number of nodes.