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Comment by option_greek | Hacker News Reader

More and more it appears that k8s is designed to extract maximum value from the tenants of the cloud companies.

You need to connect your cluster to public Internet? No problem that's $x for each load balancer (whether its needed or not).

Ohh you are feeling the whole thing feels like a blackbox and difficult to debug or observe? No problem that is $x for data dog.

Gcp is the worst when it comes to setting up k8s with preemptive nodes. Thought you could get away with preemptive nodes? Not so fast, we restart all the nodes together at end of 24 hours period so that your multi node cluster will have zero availability for 5 minutes everyday. Or jump through hoops to killing your own nodes periodically to keep them all restarting at the same time.

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Those aren't features of Kubernetes.

If you like you can install a free ingress such as NginX and route traffic to it.

If you like you can just have logs on your physical nodes and go look one by one, just as you would have to before things like k8s came along. Datadog is a value add. It's not essential.

GCP preemptible VMs are nothing to do with k8s - they are literally designed to be short-term (up to 24 hours) VMs to do things with. Yes, GKE can use them, but not as persistent resources. That's not what they're for.

Here's what they're for:

> Preemptible VMs are Compute Engine VM instances that last a maximum of 24 hours, and provide no availability guarantees.

I.e. don't try and "get away with" them. There are plenty of options for cheap K8s.

Yes, you can setup your own kubernetes if you want, using just ec2, but nobody wants to do it because it's easier to just pay.

I think k8s actually saves you money, because it allows you to use your resources better.

Yep - you can also just use a VPS or even some Raspberry Pis in your home.

The ingress can be free with Nginx but not the inbound firewall rule that passes the traffic to Nginx. And 'coincidentally' it costs the same $ as using their load balancer which automatically has this rule applied.

You're talking about a cloud provider's fees, not kubernetes.

It sounds like it's just setting up the load balancer for you behind the scenes? Kubernetes isn't a load balancing engine, to my knowledge. It just sets up containers and stuff.

If there is anything nefarious in the design and rollout of k8s it's just to make it uncool to run something small.

I've worked with it for a bunch of years now and run a cluster at home, but I do hate that it scales down so poorly. Is so much work to run a bare minimum, if not for SME-purposes but for local development. It's just starting to get acceptable.

My only real gripe with GCP is that every project is set up to use their premium networking tier by default.

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