Kubernetes Series — FREEish Clusters
Kubernetes has been a buzz word for some time now, when talking about deploying your hot all mighty microservices, Kubernetes usually is the word being tossed around. “How’s your K8s cluster running?” “Pretty good, we got it scale it up to couple of hundreds services running at the same time” is usually how the conversation starts in most cloud related conferences these days.
But, to run microservices in Kubernetes, first you’ll need to have a K8s cluster right? So how do we get a K8s cluster? More importantly, how do we get a K8s cluster with minimal administrative effort, and better yet, FREE? Why do I want free? I’m a developer and I’m cheap, and good things do come if you really look for it.
There’s an extensive list of selections on Kubernetes official set up documentation, ranging from managed solution to customizable solution based on your individual needs.
Criteria for evaluation:
FREE
Developer friendly (vs. operator friendly)
CLI experience
KubeSail
Good
- Free tier
- No time limit
- No maintenance cost
Bad
- Resource limitation on free tier
- Access is limited, so e.g. helm chart installation is not available
- Expose deployment to Internet is limited to NodePort and ClusterIP, LoadBalancer is not supported at the time of writing
Ugly
- Functionality is still pretty limited
- Sample examples doesn’t work out of the box
TryK8s
Good
- Free
- Simple to use
Bad
- Not too much documentation
Ugly
- There’re ALWAYS 1609 people in front of me so I never get my turn for the free cluster
Minikube
Good
- Total local environment
- Developer friendly
- Official local development recommendation
Bad
- Need to administer the cluster, administration overhead
- Resource consumption
Other platforms such as Platform9 and Stackpoint are only free for a certain period of time and too geared towards operators click button style.
More options such as Kublr, SysEleven, Kubermatic, Containership, Pharmer are cluster management tools rather than providing a managed K8s cluster experience, think of it as bring your own cluster (BYOC).
Then there comes the big cloud service providers, AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM Cloud, all of them provide free trial period but all comes with strings attached to try to pull you into their ecosystem (which personally I think it is fair enough).
Verdict:
After looking through most of offerings online, Kubesail will be my go to option if I want free meal but don’t want the hassle of managing the cluster myself.
In the meantime if I need something more powerful and more control, Minikube will be right in the front seat.
