Readit NewsSetting up kubernetes yourself with k3s and deploying a HA database with cnpg is so simple nowadays. It works great until some day you face an issue that you can't fix without diving deep into the details e.g. debugging your CNI or the implementations of specific operators to understand reconciliation errors. I faced countless of these issues such as:
- your Postgres CNPG failed during failover and can't recover on it's own - Postgres WAL archiving suddenly doesn't work anymore after an update. - Cluster networking on some nodes doesn't work anymore due to an incompatibility of kube-proxy and Cilium after an update
Unless it's your core business I'd limit myself to deploying applications on Kubernetes instead of managing Kubernetes itself. At least for use cases where reliability matters.
There are some reasonably priced managed Kubernetes offerings out there. For example syself (https://syself.com) built a managed Kubernetes on Hetzner. The prices are super reasonable. For 300 Euros per month you can enjoy Hetzner prices with an experience that beats AWS.
We're running our entire PaaS platform (Sherpa.sh) on top of Hetzner with Syself. We are 5x more affordable than Vercel and a big piece of that is because Syself allows us to operate autoscaling k8s clusters without an army of ops engineers.
We tried hetzner-k3s, and many other solutions. But ran into many of these same problems. Syself on the other hand, has solved all the sticky hardware and networking challenges at scale with their own customer operators. Plus they're support is super responsive and helpful.
The one downside, is they don't have a dashboard yet, so you need to be comfortable in the CLI. But I'm sure they are working on it.
I don't think I would manage kubernetes any other way at this point.
Our goal is to be the world’s lowest cost platform as a service. We do it by being full stack AI operationally - and using our relationships from 10 years in the space - we keep the costs crazy low and pass those savings on to our users.
Happy to answer any questions.
Specifically though, I have struggled with the fact that many "third places" in my city are breweries - there isn't anywhere to go if you want a large, well maintained outdoor space with seating areas, that also has food and drink options, but that isn't a restaurant looking to turn over tables.
A good NA brewing space could provide the casual "come hang out with your friends/kids" third place that a good brewery does, while catering to those looking to reduce alcohol intake or those that don't drink.
Meaning there is a decent moat and customer demand.
Netlify sets the same prices.
Just throw it into a cloud bucket from CI and be done with it.
That said, they are emerging. I'm actually working on a drop-in Vercel competitor at https://www.sherpa.sh. We're 70% lower cost by running on EU based CDN and dedicated servers (Hetzner, etc). But we had to build the relationships to solve all the above challenges first.