[smt88]

Not a big AWS fan or anything, but...

> they rely on bad math capabilities of their clients

No, they don't. Showing hourly prices makes sense for hourly services.

They also provide a detailed cost estimator, because the arithmetic gets pretty detailed: https://calculator.aws

> compared to a root server for $10 that easily outperforms a $60 EC2 instance that's really overpriced.

Let's say a developer costs $75/hr. If AWS saves my dev team 10 hrs/mo., then I'm willing to pay a $750 premium for it.

Developer costs are also unpredictable. Turnover will cause spikes in my costs, for example.

Server costs are predictable. If I need to pay AWS more to save my developers time, I can always do that. I can't always just throw another developer onto my team when I need one.

The only people who are optimizing for three-figure costs every month are either: 1) paying very, very low salaries to their developers, or 2) not thinking about their biggest cost, which is developer time.

> When hosting a simple one-node Kubernetes cluster

Who would do this and why? Why would you have a load balancer in front of a single server?

[ftreml]

> The only people who are optimizing for three-figure costs every month are either:

In our case, we are doing the same for around 50 clients, so it sums up :-)

> Who would do this and why? Why would you have a load balancer in front of a single server?

afaik, for publishing something to the outside world from EKS, that's the only way - even for single node clusters

[smt88]

> In our case, we are doing the same for around 50 clients, so it sums up :-)

Wow, so AWS is actually a better value for you than for most people. Being able to easily script and deploy your infra is hugely valuable when you have so much overhead.

We heavily use Elastic Beanstalk for dozens of running services, and it's amazing. We don't think about infra at all.

> for publishing something to the outside world from EKS

But why are you using Kubernetes at all? What problem is it solving for you?

See also: https://endler.dev/2019/maybe-you-dont-need-kubernetes/

[ftreml]

We built a software (Botium Box - https://botium.ai) mainly for On-Premise use, and we delivered as Kubernetes, Openshift, Docker. We added a hosted plan later and thought it would be a good idea to just use managed Kubernetes for this offer as it didn't require much coding changes.

We have to support multiple clouds (Azure and AWS), but with Rancher, it is really easy in usage - setting up new clusters, deploying new services, restarting, logging etc. But now that we built up container technology know-how we are transitioning every service where we don't need the scaling capabilities of Kubernetes to plain old docker-compose on baremetal.

Thanks for the interesting article, didn't know about Nomad and will try it for sure.