I’m planning on doing something similar but want to use Talos with bare metal machines. I suspect to see similar price reductions from our current EKS bill.
It took minutes to setup a cluster and I love having a UI to see what is happening.
I wish there were more products like this as I suspect there will be a trend towards more self-managed Kubernetes clusters given how expensive the cloud is becoming.
Last time I tried was admittedly in 2022, but in testing which distro to go with bottlerocket lost because we couldn't setup local builds...
My one big experience with it was the recent bug which (as I recall) attempted to harden the system by marking memory pages as no-execute, which caused virtual runtime languages like Java to basically break entirely when running on a node using this version of Bottlerocket.
It was fixed pretty quickly, but it did feel like a weird thing to slip through...