[mbonca]

We ran our project on Google's K8s for $76 a month for quite a while. They provide one free Master. There is no way, EVER, that I would host K8s myself for the size of the projects I usually work on. But having a panic in one of my services at 1am, and K8s auto-restarting the pod is amazing. Namespaces even let us run three separate environments for that same $76. We have a couple thousand users per day who are in the app all day, so not a large project. We use other services like GCP Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub, PostgreSQL, etc. that require next to no setup. We are up to 3 nodes in our small cluster and still costing us less than $350 a month.

K8s is repetitive. You create one YAML for a service and the rest are similar. Rolling releases are a simple script. As small as our company and product is, I think K8s has been one of our best decisions.

Some things like MongoDB can quickly triple your costs though. We were able to pick technologies that kept the cost really low and stack maintainable.