If you go with a provider that provides the control plane for free, which is the way Google Cloud and Digital Ocean do it (and probably many others), a single node cluster is actually a valid cluster. It won't have redundancy / High Availability which is Kubernetes' raison d'être, but it works well. If so, Kubernetes is no more expensive than non-Kubernetes. In the case of Digital Ocean, $10/month.

I‘m running at three node Kubernetes cluster for less than $10 a month using this guide: https://github.com/hobby-kube/guide

Disclaimer: I‘m the author.

Damn, wish I found this before I spent days stumbling through my first Kubernetes set up.

Ignorant HA requirements, will this work fine with a single beefy node in home network or would I be better off running multiple vms on that single server which then run separate Kubernetes nodes?

You can get a single-node k8s cluster running super easily with [Minikube](https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube). The more recent Docker for windows/mac actually comes with a kubernetes distro that piggybacks off the docker vm.

If we're talking managed, DigitalOcean maybe? (The master server part is free, you pay for compute etc of the nodes)

You could possibly do it cheaper on AWS with RI discounts, but you'd have to setup the cluster yourself to avoid the ~$140/mo fee.

Consider just running Minikube on your laptop. It’s pretty realistic and won’t cost you a penny. Except maybe in electricity, it seems to consume an enormous wattage just to exist...

minikube --vm-driver=none consumes a lot less resources, and k3s even fewer.

K3s is fantastic. Lately I've been using K3d (which is the same thing, just in a docker container - much like Kind) It's super easy to spin up a cluster, and spin it back down with nothing really to clean up.

I’m using Hyper-V at the moment, I’ll check out your suggestions - thanks

I’m building a startup that provides hosted, shared Kubernetes clusters starting for 0$/month. https://kubesail.com - I agree with everyone on this thread that using k8s for a blog is like building your own house from scratch - but the analogy breaks down when everything underneath the Kube api is managed and setup for you - at that point is just becomes a standard, open cloud API :)

3 node k3s cluster on hetzner cloud for about 10€/month

And easily provisioned with https://github.com/xetys/hetzner-kube (not affiliated, but I tried it out once and found the deployment to work smoothly)

My cluster is at $30 a month, which is slightly more than my dokku server; but I get so much more out of it that I think it's worth it.

I'm not very familiar with kubernetes, what do you get out of it that you don't with dokku? I really like dokku and use it on my personal server for all my half-baked personal projects.

Mostly automatic DNS management and it being more easy to use more than one machine for things.

If you just/first want to practice actual, multi-node k8s on your local Mac (or Windows), I've just completed this: https://github.com/youurayy/hyperctl

Cheapest would probably be somewhere around 10$. Three VPS with 4GB ram somewhere.

Im running mine with three VPS and 8GB ram. Just for personal services and learning/fucking around purposes.

I run a very small GKE cluster with two 1vCPU preemptible nodes. Costs me a few bucks per month.

I was thinking of doing the same thing. How much in average do you pay per month?

I thought GKE the control nodes are free but but on EKS you pay heaps for them.