The amount of companies who use K8s when they have no business nor technological justification for it is staggering. It is the number one blocker in moving to bare metal/on prem when costs become too much.
Yes, on prem has its gotchas just like the EKS deployment described in the post, but everything is so much simpler and straightforward it's much easier to grasp the on prem side of things.
Instead you can take k8s, deploy it to bare metal, and have a much much more power for a much lower cost. Of course this requires some technical knowledge, but the benefits are significant (lower costs, stable costs, no vendor lock-in, all the postgres extensions you want, response times halved, etc).
k8s smoothes over the vagaries of bare-metal very nicely.
If you'll excuse a quick plug for my work: We [1] offer a middle ground for this, whereby we do and manage all this for you. We take over all DevOps and infrastructure responsibility while also cutting spend by around 50%. (cloud hardware really is that expensive in comparison).
[1]: https://lithus.eu
>all the postgres extensions you want
You can run Postgres in any managed K8s environment (say AWS EKS) just fine and enable any extensions you want as well. Unless you're conflating managed Postgres solutions like RDS, which would imply that the only way to run databases is by using a managed service of your cloud of choice, which obviously isn't true.
You absolutely can do this, and we do ineed run Postgres in-cluster.
We generally see that people prefer a managed solution when it comes to operating their databases. Which means that when it comes to their (eg) AWS EKS clusters, they often use RDS rather than running the DB in-cluster.
Our service is also a managed service, and that comes with in-cluster databases. So clients still get a managed service, but without the limitations of (eg) RDS.
Naively, I would think it be neutral, since I would assume that if a customer gets k8s running on-prem, then apps designed for running in k8s should have a straightforward migration path?
In cloud environments, it's pretty common that your cloud provider has specific implementations of Kubernetes objects, either by creating custom resources that you can make use of, or just building opinionated default instances of things like storage classes, load balancers, etc.
It's pretty easy to not think about the implementation details of, say, an object-storage-backed PVC until you need to do it in a K8s instance that doesn't already have your desired storage class. Then you've got to figure out how to map your simple-but-custom $thing from provider-managed to platform-managed. If you're moving into Rancher, for instance, it's relatively batteries-included, but there are definitely considerations you need to make for things like how machines are built from disk storage perspective and where longhorn drives are mapped, for instance.
It's like that for a ton of stuff, and a whole lot of the Kubernetes/OutsideInfra interface is like that. Networking, storage, maybe even certificate management, those all need considerations if you're migrating from cloud to on-prem.
I’ve ran 3 server k3s instances on bare metal and they work very well with little maintenance. I didn’t do anything special, and while it’s more complex than some ansible scripts and haproxy, I think the breadth of tooling makes it worth it.
Cost wise it's a no brainer. Three servers with 64 GB ECC and 6 cores for the price of three M5 larges. So 192 GB and 18 cores for the price of 24GB and 6 cores.
I think one of reason k8s can get a bad rap is how expensive it is to even approach doing it right with cloud hosting, but to me it seems like a perfect use case for bare metal where there is no built in orchestration.
I remember a guy I used to work with telling me he'd been at a consulting shop and they used Kubernetes for everything - including static marketing sites. I assume it was a combination of resume and bill padding.
This guy told me it was just shameless over-engineering.
DigitalOcean is just a hosting provider. You can buy just regular 'Droplets' (dedicated machine nodes) and host whatever you want on there, no serverless cloud junk. They also offer Managed Kubernetes. I use both.