[still_grokking]

> managed kubernetes service at minimal added cost

I dare to disagree. The costs are in fact horrific!

There are orders of magnitude in costs between running your stuff yourself vs the highest level of managed services on the cloud which is usually managed k8s.

(That also explains why there is so much marketing fuss, and push of management, to use k8s: It's by far the most profitable offering for the cloud providers).

[jpgvm]

It's not. You generally only pay for the master clusters with no per-node costs over whatever instance type you are using and scheduling class (ondemand, reserved, spot, etc).

So not only are the masters relatively cheap, they cost is amortized over the cluster size.

AWS is probably very unhappy about this but they were forced into this by GKE pricing model. Google pushed people to adopt k8s not because they can make a lot of money from people using it but because they can take away a lot of money from AWS and increase workload portability, which benefits Google far more than AWS as they are in second place.

The most expensive managed services are things like RDS, MSK, Elasticache, etc. MSK in particular is pretty egregious with a 80% premium considering they haven't done any additional engineering like RDS.