Right now with k8s it is definit a 'ongoing maintenance'. We allocate around 0.5-2 pt per week on only doing that. If we would not do that, most of our stuff would be already outdated.
I know already too many people which are stuck at a certain k8s version. Do not allow that to happen!
Thats for me the most frustrating thing with GCP, AWS and Azure. I would never use them as a very early small 3 people startup or for private reasons.
There is no billing protection (which could make you very poor very fast) and every service has a certain cost and quality which is just not feasable in the beginning.
Also a ton of great features on gke you will probably never use if you are too small. It is so much cheaper to just get cheap hardware somewhere and put your own k8s onto it if you have more time then money.
Even on Digital Ocean you have the load balancer problem: you need to use the provided and also 'costly' LoadBalancer service. There is only one hacky way to prevent it by exposing your ingress on the host and mapping that one ip but then you loose all the self healing stuff and loadbalancing capability.
Both AWS and Google offer free tier products and pay-for-what-you-use products. Reserved instance pricing starts at around $25/year. Many other incredibly useful products (S3, Lambda, VPC, etc.) are free with an instance or start at $0.
You can set billing alerts that will project your monthly budget every hour, and send you an alert when it's projected to be exceeded.
IMHO your claim (that there is an entry cost barrier) is the opposite of reality. AWS and Google have brought incredible power and choice to developers starting at zero initial cost.
My main concern is, that i can't define an upper limit. My billing alert is nice and im aware of it, but it doesn't help you if someone takes over your account, mines bitcoins on expensive machines and a day later you read your email.
The fundamental issue with setting a limit is it's technically infeasible to decide what to do when it's exceeded. They have no way of knowing what assets to terminate. The way to avoid what you describe is to shut off access to APIs that you don't want to use, and keep your credentials safe.
AWS has budgets that do exactly what you want. For the "cost budget": "Monitor your costs against a specified dollar amount and receive alerts when your user-defined thresholds are met."
If I’m running a startup trying to develop a product with limited staff, the last thing I want to be worried about is the “undifferentiated heavy lifting”. I want to be concentrating on what is going to add business value.
Then again, I know enough about AWS and how to control my cost.
> you loose all the self healing stuff and loadbalancing capability.
I mean, yes? You can either build your own for “free”, or pay for the value-add features DO provides that you have described. I don’t see where the problem is.
Good point about GKE blocking resources on the nodes. I wish they would at least allow more control over that with the introduction of the master fees.
What? Shouldn't you try to make the creation and deletion of your staging cluster cheap instead of moving it to somewhere else?
And if that is your central infrastructure, shouldn't it be worth the money?
I do get the issue with having cheap and beefy hardware somewhere else, i do that as well, but only for private. My hourly salary spending or wasting time on stuff like that costs the company more than just paying for an additional cluster with the same settings but perhaps with much less Nodes.
If more than one person is using it, the multiplication effects for suddenly unproductive people, is much higher. Also that decreases the per head cost.
The salary of people working and using those 'tools' this infrastructure is higher then 300$.
If your kubernetes cluster is part of your core infrastructure, then 300$ more or less should not be an issue at all (not to say that i think 300$ is nothing).
That should not mean that you should waste money but often enough, if you buy cheap and your hardware breaks and your time&material costs much more then what a better hardware would have cost, then you wasted money by buying cheap.
Unfortunate with IT products, there are certain things which are not directly visible: Like how secure is your product. GCP offers 2FA, Digital Ocean does not. How much money is it worth to you to have your whole infrastructure protected by 2FA? For me in a business context, non 2FA would be a no go.
I know already too many people which are stuck at a certain k8s version. Do not allow that to happen!