We are running many hundreds of jobs on those peak days with only a handful running on any other day. While many bring up examples where 24/7 infrastructure from a single box is more than plenty, we find that we can run micro VMs in this configuration and not have to worry about resource contention as our jobs run.
Pre-GKE, we were managing the timing manually, which was fine until we started to scale, but we found this to be a far better situation. Particularly because we simply don't have to think about it.
YMMV.
At this scale, you don't need Kubernetes, invest in a pocket calculator instead.
We are an ESOP so, as employee owners, it behooves us to be as cost-conscious as possible.
Uhhh what? I mean even my personal DO based cluster runs about $40 a month. I'm skeptical a production cluster is at $50.
Service Compute Engine Kubernetes Engine
Cost. $191.78 $62.34
Discounts ($13.96) ($62.34)
Promotions and others $0.00 $0.00
Subtotal $177.83 $0.00
1. I don't know about any of this; we don't seem to have problems.
2. This sounds like an architecture issue, not a k8s issue.
3. Our entire GKE infrastructure costs less than $50 a month.
4. You're right here; it doesn't work 'well', but it works 'well enough' for our use cases.
5. I'm sure you're talking about some event that was far more complex than the few times we've had to drain our pool, but we did what we needed to do without downtime in production. While annoyingly esoteric, I thought it worked pretty fucking well compared to our alternatives.