I run a very small GKE cluster with two 1vCPU preemptible nodes. Costs me a few bucks per month.

If we're talking managed, DigitalOcean maybe? (The master server part is free, you pay for compute etc of the nodes)

You could possibly do it cheaper on AWS with RI discounts, but you'd have to setup the cluster yourself to avoid the ~$140/mo fee.

Cheapest would probably be somewhere around 10$. Three VPS with 4GB ram somewhere.

Im running mine with three VPS and 8GB ram. Just for personal services and learning/fucking around purposes.

3 node k3s cluster on hetzner cloud for about 10€/month

Consider just running Minikube on your laptop. It’s pretty realistic and won’t cost you a penny. Except maybe in electricity, it seems to consume an enormous wattage just to exist...

If you just/first want to practice actual, multi-node k8s on your local Mac (or Windows), I've just completed this: https://github.com/youurayy/hyperctl

I thought GKE the control nodes are free but but on EKS you pay heaps for them.

I‘m running at three node Kubernetes cluster for less than $10 a month using this guide: https://github.com/hobby-kube/guide

Disclaimer: I‘m the author.

If you go with a provider that provides the control plane for free, which is the way Google Cloud and Digital Ocean do it (and probably many others), a single node cluster is actually a valid cluster. It won't have redundancy / High Availability which is Kubernetes' raison d'être, but it works well. If so, Kubernetes is no more expensive than non-Kubernetes. In the case of Digital Ocean, $10/month.

My cluster is at $30 a month, which is slightly more than my dokku server; but I get so much more out of it that I think it's worth it.

I’m building a startup that provides hosted, shared Kubernetes clusters starting for 0$/month. https://kubesail.com - I agree with everyone on this thread that using k8s for a blog is like building your own house from scratch - but the analogy breaks down when everything underneath the Kube api is managed and setup for you - at that point is just becomes a standard, open cloud API :)

Thanks a lot ! Keel looks exactly like something I would need!

Using NodePort and Traefik ingress controller.

One possibility (especially for "home Kubernetes" case) is not exposing the services to the outside world at all and using ZeroTier to access them https://www.zerotier.com/ It's L2 mesh VPN, and I believe you can even use MetalLB with it with some minor trickery. You can, of course, set up WireGuard or OpenVPN for yourself, too, but from my experience zt is the simplest for accessing the boxes behind NAT as you don't even need to set up any servers with real IPs.

Hi, my shameless plug (I am the creator of webhookrelay): https://webhookrelay.com/v1/guide/ingress-controller, using it both for services that are running in GKE and on minikube locally. It's cheaper than allocating a LB IP for backing services that don't get much traffic like Grafana and similar things.

DNAT. You map one/more ports from your router exposed on internet to ip:port of the local app.

However, http/https ports are already used on routers to offer an admin web GUI. It’s technically possible to circumvent this with some ad-hoc firewall rules, but it depends if the router admin UI let’s you do that.

You don't necessarily need an ingress, NodePort may be sufficient to expose a service.

So you're running bare metal k8s at home? What do you use for storage? That's my biggest question in how to move frok minikube at home to a true cluster.