[_bare_metal]

I run https://BareMetalSavings.com.

The amount of companies who use K8s when they have no business nor technological justification for it is staggering. It is the number one blocker in moving to bare metal/on prem when costs become too much.

Yes, on prem has its gotchas just like the EKS deployment described in the post, but everything is so much simpler and straightforward it's much easier to grasp the on prem side of things.

[adamcharnock]

I've come at this from a slightly different angle. I've seen many clients running k8s on expensive cloud instances, but to me that is solving the same problems twice. Both k8s and cloud instances solve a highly related and overlapping set of problems.

Instead you can take k8s, deploy it to bare metal, and have a much much more power for a much lower cost. Of course this requires some technical knowledge, but the benefits are significant (lower costs, stable costs, no vendor lock-in, all the postgres extensions you want, response times halved, etc).

k8s smoothes over the vagaries of bare-metal very nicely.

If you'll excuse a quick plug for my work: We [1] offer a middle ground for this, whereby we do and manage all this for you. We take over all DevOps and infrastructure responsibility while also cutting spend by around 50%. (cloud hardware really is that expensive in comparison).

[1]: https://lithus.eu

[outime]

>Instead you can take k8s, deploy it to bare metal, and have a much much more power for a much lower cost. Of course this requires some technical knowledge, but the benefits are significant (lower costs, stable costs, no vendor lock-in, all the postgres extensions you want, response times halved, etc).

>all the postgres extensions you want

You can run Postgres in any managed K8s environment (say AWS EKS) just fine and enable any extensions you want as well. Unless you're conflating managed Postgres solutions like RDS, which would imply that the only way to run databases is by using a managed service of your cloud of choice, which obviously isn't true.

[abtinf]

Could you expand a bit on the point of K8S being a blocker to moving to on-prem?

Naively, I would think it be neutral, since I would assume that if a customer gets k8s running on-prem, then apps designed for running in k8s should have a straightforward migration path?

[MPSimmons]

I can expand a little bit, but based on your question, I suspect you may know everything I'm going to type.

In cloud environments, it's pretty common that your cloud provider has specific implementations of Kubernetes objects, either by creating custom resources that you can make use of, or just building opinionated default instances of things like storage classes, load balancers, etc.

It's pretty easy to not think about the implementation details of, say, an object-storage-backed PVC until you need to do it in a K8s instance that doesn't already have your desired storage class. Then you've got to figure out how to map your simple-but-custom $thing from provider-managed to platform-managed. If you're moving into Rancher, for instance, it's relatively batteries-included, but there are definitely considerations you need to make for things like how machines are built from disk storage perspective and where longhorn drives are mapped, for instance.

It's like that for a ton of stuff, and a whole lot of the Kubernetes/OutsideInfra interface is like that. Networking, storage, maybe even certificate management, those all need considerations if you're migrating from cloud to on-prem.

[hobofan]

Here is your business justification: K8s / Helm charts have become the de-facto standard for packaging applications for on-premise deployments. If you choose any other deployment option on a setup/support contract, the supplier will likely charge you for additional hours.

[pmig]

This is also what we observe while building Distr. ISVs are in need for a container registry to hand over these images to their customers. Our container registry will be purpose build for this use-case.

[jamesfinlayson]

> The amount of companies who use K8s when they have no business nor technological justification for it is staggering.

I remember a guy I used to work with telling me he'd been at a consulting shop and they used Kubernetes for everything - including static marketing sites. I assume it was a combination of resume and bill padding.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

I'm using k8s for my static marketing site. It's in the same cluster as my app tho, so I'm not paying extra for it. Don't think I'd do it otherwise.

[reillyse]

Out of interest do you recommend any good places to host a machine in the US? A major part of why I like cloud is because it really simplifies the hardware maintenance.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

I'm running kubernetes on digital ocean. It was under $100/mo until last week when I upgraded a couple nodes because memory was getting a bit tight. That was just a couple clicks so not a big deal. We've been with them over 10 years now. Mostly pretty happy. They've had a couple small outages.

[yimby2001]

Talos for on prem k8s is dead simple