Comment by SOLAR_FIELDS | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SOLAR_FIELDS | Hacker News Reader

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To give some hobbyist level price increase numbers:

I'm currently running two basic droplets at 8gb RAM and 4vCPU, which is basically just enough resources for a proper dev kubernetes cluster with Promethueus, Loki, 5-6 apps, etc (4gb 4vCPU is not enough, I tried). I also run a third 1gb1vcpu management droplet outside the cluster as well as a load balancer in front of my API gateway and a spaces instance to dump backups and store stuff like terraform state. My previous bill was $102 and it looks like it will now under this new pricing with all of the above be about $125 which is about 20% increase.

Are there similar managed kubernetes offerings out there that are better on price? My understanding is that I could probably half this or even do better if I run my own control plane on some other provider but if I want managed k8's is this still the best option price wise? I guess if something like Hetzner or OVH is less than half the price it may even be worth the headache to run my own control plane (which has it's own advantages too - currently I'm stuck with Cilium on DOKS and it would be nice to use another network provider for some of my use cases).

> 8gb RAM and 4vCPU

This is Raspberry Pi 4 territory. Your monthly cost is the price of hardware, per month. If you are on a home 1G connection, your home bandwidth is as good or better than what you are getting on DO. At the end of a year, you would have a 12 node cluster.

Mythic Beasts[1] do Pi hosting for a reasonable amount - not used them personally, but I have been recommended to them by a few people

[1] https://www.mythic-beasts.com

Is an old arm CPU really comparable to a Xeon/epyc?

And home connections are all asymmetric, you may get a gig down but I've not seen anything outside business class with over 50 up.

I am not advocating that people run k3s on raspberry class hardware, just that GP is overpaying for what they are getting. An Ebay server machine colo'd would be several orders of magnitude more capable at the same cost.

My 1G connection sees 250M up and down continuously.

Good luck actually buying a Pi right now

Or equivalent is implied.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2021/pine64-and-radxas-new...

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-m1-with-8gbyte-ram/

PS Shame on you Radxa for naming your module CM3, shame. There will be a flood of RK3588 based devices on the market in the next 6-12 months. A low end PC would replace 10s of these devices.

My point was that a 4 vcpu instance is overpriced and also a very small amount of compute. Most cloud costs are 1/3 to 1 of price of hardware, per month.

I'm pretty sure GCP's managed kubernetes service offers 1 control plane as part of the free tier

Was going to say the same. If its just 1 cluster then you probably will be cheaper overall on GCP.

So you're spending $102 a month for some hobby things?

Yep - it's also an exercise to keep my cloud engineering skills up to date - I can take the approach I use on the hobby projects and apply it to production level stuff in my job.

If it's an exercise to keep your cloud engineering skills up to date, perhaps you'd like to manage your own Kubernetes? Then I'm sure it can be much cheaper.

Maybe this is part of the training. Paying overpriced fees and stay addicted to the cloud.

Spending money on hobbies is part of the benefits of working no? If you can afford the essentials I would hope people are spending money on things they enjoy.

Pretty cheap if you account for the very employable skills either being learned or kept sharp!

You might want to look into OVH's k8s offering [1]. You only pay the worker nodes and the general purpose instances cost 26,18 € per month offering 2vcpu and 7 gb RAM [2].

[1] https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/public-cloud/prices/#568

[2] https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/public-cloud/prices/#419

Thank you!

k3s makes running your own control plane relatively painless if you're not too opinionated about some things

Also k3s will run on much smaller instances

r/homelab

What are your traffic requirements?

Very very low - I used only 30 gb of the massive amount DO gives you last month. Basically currently just have some stuff periodically sending data in and most of the outbound is just small REST responses.

I think Scaleway is pretty cheap

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