Cheap Kubernetes Cluster on AWS with Kubeadm

  • I'm running a three node cluster on Hetzner Cloud for less than $10 a month. Comprehensive guide and automated provisioning available here: https://github.com/hobby-kube/guide

  • > If anyone has any suggestions on a better way of doing this without shelling out $20 a month for an ELB, please open an Issue!

    kubehost was designed for this purpose on GKE: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/kubehost

  • You can totally install Minikube on AWS [1], which removes the need for a dedicated master and drop the price to that of a single instance.

    Not sure why you'd ever want to do this, given that GKE or DO will always be cheaper and AWS's core services aren't all that special, but as a thought experiment it's interesting.

    [1] https://www.radishlogic.com/kubernetes/running-minikube-in-a...

  • I love the attitude here - because in my privileged western world worrying if my monthly hosting costs are one latte and crossiant or two seems quaint.

    But even in the "rich" EU Avergae monthly wages can be only 1,000 USD, making this a tenth of a day's work, and we don't have to go much further afield to see 6 bucks becoming a significant chunk of a workers day.

    So thank you, some kids somewhere will be able to afford to develop skills because you started penny pinching.

    cheers

  • Google Cloud and Digital Ocean both offer managed kubernetes clusters, you only pay for the workers.

  • Can it be considered cheap if the cluster is also small? The overhead of the control plane+networking can be quite big, and can easily use more resources than what a m1.small has to offer.

  • How's this better than kops? https://github.com/kubernetes/kops

  • My project keights[1] can build a cheap two node cluster in AWS, but is not limited to small clusters. Though, it does spin up an ELB unlike this one.

    1. https://github.com/cloudboss/keights

  • You can use haproxy as a tcp load balancer for the apiserver instead of an elb