>They don't necessarily bill by the RAM, but definitely network and disk I/O, which are also magnified quite significantly. Especially considering you require redundancy/HA when dealing with the distributed computing

Network and Disk I/O come with basically 0 overhead with containers.

> Especially considering you require redundancy/HA when dealing with the distributed computing

Why? This is not an apples to apples to comparison then. If you don't need HA, just run a single container, there's plenty other benefits besides easier clustering.

>My Kibana instance alone could be characterized as "a couple of gigs". Though I produce quite a lot of logs. Although that is not a problem with logrotate and grep.

How is Kibana(!) relevant for container resource usage? Just don't use it and go with logrotate and grep? Even if you decide to go with a cluster, you can continue to use syslog and aggregate it :shrug: