Well, $25 is 5 times as much as $5, so if the costs scale at a similar level then your $500 hosting costs will end up being $2,500 which, depending on your business, may or may not be a significant cost.

Back when I worked for a hosting company specializing in RoR we had more than a few customers migrate to us because Heroku costs were getting out of hand (and we weren't all that cheap either!)

In my specific case I'm prototyping what could perhaps be a startup, and with a few small cheap Linode VPS's I can get a lot of bang for my buck.

> Do you know how much it cost my employer for me to spend an hour reading about Kubernetes?

A lot, which is why you shouldn't use it. You can run a VPS without k8s.

> Suggesting that $25/month is expensive illustrates how insanely cost-sensitive this community is.

I completely agree but I’m not sure “cost-sensitive” is an adequate term because it’s like a cost on hosting (or an app you’ll use for years) triggers extremely high awareness by people who are extremely blasé about hemorrhaging staff time on support and slipped deadlines.

Sometimes it can be hard to give up sysadmin work because people consider it to be a core competency and to let that go feels like a loss. Kubernetes hits the sweet spot where you get to use a tool to manage sysadmin work that is at least as much work as hiring a sysadmin.

Not everyone is thinking in terms of an employer, or looking to build a profitable business. One of the main sticking point for my side projects is related to deployment environments.

Heroku is painless enough for unprofitable hobby projects, but far too expensive. Using AWS, GCP or Azure directly is relatively affordable, but requires a lot of extra work.

I'm aware of various tools that are supposed to make working with the various cloud platforms much easier, but every time I see one of these used in practice (eg at work), people seem to spend an enormous amount of time getting things working properly. It still feels like we're missing a sweet spot for hobbyists who don't want to invest their spare time learning about and wrangling with devops, just to get a simple project up and running.

Has anyone ever recommended Kubernetes to anybody as a production environment for an "unprofitable hobby project"? In the context of the article we’re discussing, the suggestion that $30 is an unreasonable operations overhead for a team of four engineers is thoroughly preposterous.

Tangential, but if anyone wants something Heroku-like in for deployments and monitoring but less [eae-of-use gui] control over scaling I recommend Digital Oceans “one click” Dokku deployment.

I’ve used it at work for sunset of our projects and it’s been pretty good once you learn a few of the gotchas. Once you’re set up it’s pretty painless. There are limitations for sure, but it’s been handy for a few situations where we didn’t want to focus on deployments and keep them as simple as possible.

If you're going for Heroku because of its simplicity, I don't consider the alternative to be "spend an hour reading about Kubernetes" (and presumably many more hours when I have to troubleshoot it next week). I'm not touching Kubernetes or Docker or any of that.

Even on AWS, I can deploy with one short command, and it's much cheaper than Heroku.

Can you run a one-off instance like “heroku run <command>”?

Not all businesses pay $200/hour for consultants. There are a lot of small businesses out there.

"A small $1M expense budget" may be "small" for certain companies, but it's more than the yearly revenue for a lot of businesses, never mind people who are trying to start a business and don't have any revenue at all (yet).

Of course you need to be reasonable and not penny-pinch or "spend money to save money", but in general I would say that frugality is a virtue.