
I moved my sites from Google Kubernetes Engine to Netlify and saved $1000 / year - SIRHAMY
https://labs.iamhamy.xyz/posts/i-moved-to-netlify-from-gke-and-saved-60-per-month/
======
yanilkr
This post was amusing to me for so many reasons. The author did this for his
personal project, cheers to him for his passion to try out new technology.

This is roughly similar to what happens in technology teams all across the
business units.

Manager 1: We are streamlining all our product offerings to a Kubernetes
container cluster. Why you ask? We want to modernize our stack and we want to
attract best talent.

Manager 1 and the team collects the rewards

...... few months later

Manager 2: We reduced the cost of operations by x% by simplifying operations.
Aka rolling back to something other than Kubernates.

Manager 2 Collects the rewards

Every time, there is a detailed intelligent write up about what we are going
to do and what we did and how awesome it was.

Believe it or not, internet has a way of influencing the really smart people
with branding and advertising driving them to a form of resume driven
development.

Kubernetes to developers is like what Axe body spray is to teenagers.

Just use Axe Deodorant and women will be all over you.

~~~
mrich
The frustrating is that these virulent things often define the standard,
instead of a well-thought-through solution. E.g. JavaScript.

------
meritt
The title of this article is frustrating, it comes across like an ad for
Netlify. The author moved to Google Cloud and Kubernetes because he wanted to
attain hands-on experience on those platforms, not because he seriously
thought it was the right technical choice for his 25 visitors a day static
blogs.

So he spent $1k to learn GCP and K8s. That seems like money well spent.

~~~
number6
I guess he could have spend the money in training and would be better off.

~~~
EduardoBautista
There is no replacement for hands-on experience.

------
cdoxsey
$1,000/yr is definitely excessive. You can have managed Kubernetes for ~
$100/yr from Google or (recently) Digital Ocean using smaller instance types.

The point about maintenance is a good one if you're running purely static
sites. K8s has a steep learning curve, though FWIW I think its probably easier
than systemd and standard unix administration + puppet/chef/ansible/etc.

~~~
Spartan-S63
For sure. $1000/yr is excessive. For a third the cost, you can have a three
node, small cluster on DO that you can experiment with. I did it prior and
will probably do it again in the future when I have something worth hosting
out on the web.

I agree with your second point, too. If you don't view K8s as something you
need to know _everything_ about, it's a powerful tool that simplifies things
that you'd need multiple tools for. I never really learned provisioning tools
like Puppet/Chef/Ansible and Systemd, so k8s was a fresh experience for me. I
like it, though, because I really like containers over VMs as the unit that's
running my code.

~~~
sombremesa
GKE is cheaper than DO if you don't have huge cpu needs, I just checked it
recently. DO minimum is $15/mo for kubernetes, on Google you can get to around
$7 with a "micro" VM.

That is, if you really want managed kubernetes. Otherwise you can get a $5 VM
on DO.

------
cryptoneer
I'm saving 2000 USD per year myself here is how I did it: I bought a truck
loaded with 1000 KG of stuff I never use to drive to work and the gas was very
expensive, but now I have switched to a smaller car without any load and save
2000 USD on gas every year.

------
skybrian
It would be interesting to see a comparison to App Engine, which seems like a
better fit than Kubernetes for low-traffic sites.

~~~
spankalee
Yeah, App Engine would have cost $0 since that traffic would fit in the free
tier.

Cloud Run would be the slightly more general and newer way to do this too, and
the free tire there is 2 million req/month. I _think_ he could have migrated
containers directly from GKE.

~~~
SIRHAMY
Oh wow, I'd never heard of Cloud Run before. Just popped some numbers in that
I think are correct and it did come within the free tier range.

See GCP calculator:
[https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=36a5f437-98...](https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=36a5f437-98f9-4837-a937-287ae4250ebf)

------
mchmarny
Based on the write up it seems that the author could benefit from the fully
managed version of Cloud Run on GCP ([https://cloud.run](https://cloud.run)).
No cluster to manage would help with maintenance pains and per request billing
model could potentially lower the overall costs given the scale to 0
capability.

~~~
inlined
I was going to mention this as well. Any time a user has an underutilized K8S
cluster if only 3 nodes I immediately wonder if the auto-scaling (to zero)
docker-running features of Cloud Run are what they’re really looking for.

------
antb123
github actions to deploy a hugo static site on github pages = free

------
bm1362
Anyone have any recommendations for a managed Compute/Postgres stack that’s
less than 100/month? I was trying Heroku but frustrated by the single port per
container and lack of static ips.

~~~
amerine
What do you need a static IP for? (Also, fwiw, we have add on providers that
do give you static IPs)

~~~
bm1362
I wanted to point my root domain (hosted by Google) to the Heroku app DNS
target. I was able to solve this by using Cloudflare instead, with flattening.

------
carlsborg
You could probably save as much or more going to an AWS Serverless stack (S3
and Cloudfront CDN for the front end, lambda on the backend. Shoot me an email
if you like.)

