Reddit DevOps

Kubernetes on DigitalOcean pricing for low usage and limitations

Hello,
I'm hosting a Rails application for a client of mine and the total cost is about 30$/month, that is 3 droplets, one is postgres, 1 is "background workers" and one is "web" (6$+6$+18$).

I've been "constantly" dealing with the annoyance of having to upgrade the servers, which deserve way more maintenance than I give them, but lately after I made a bunch of changes to the application, I realized that I would like to avoid this all together: makes deployment stressful, I feel uncomfortable because of security patches I need to keep up with at the server level (on top of the app!) and in general even two identical servers diverge somewhat over time.
I thought of just running Docker images inside simple droplets, but putting docker images inside systemd seems to come with some limitations (the process for killing the image is not straightforward)

Out of curiosity, I'm exploring the idea of using kubernetes and terraform as an alternative, I like learning so studying comes as a plus in some way.

Notice that this app has been up for over 10 years, but it still receives new features, so I'm expecting more requests and changes over time.

Is it possible to come close in pricing in DO using Kubernetes? I'd like to know before I commit to even studying stuff. The main questions are:

Basic node pricing seems to be 12$, but it also say that the cost is based on a per-droplet basis, which one is it, if I want to use a 6$ droplet for one of the nodes, will it still cost 12$?
Is a load balancer required? What's the downside of not having one in this case
I need a safe place to store file uploads. The app doesn't support S3 yet, so it needs to be something mounted as a filesystem. I was reading that I can't mount NFS on multiple instances, which would be a serious limitation, is this correct? Is there anything I could share between nodes that I can mount as a filesystem?
are my app logs kept anywhere if I need to debug?

There are quite a few things I can compromise on:

managed postgres, i already discussed this additional expense, so the "postgres" node will be gone
I can pay for Spaces ($5/month),it's a waste because space usage is like 10GB,definitely not 100
one of the machines is currently 2gb of ram, 2 vcpus (needed for the big excel files generated occasionally). I can split this in 2, but from my understanding, I would need a load balancer in that case, increasing the price.

Is there any way to scale to 0 the "background worker" node without spending money on a node to orchestrate that (keda or knative)? That node is used highly infrequently.

Based on my calculation, I would end up needing:

2 nodes, one will cost 12$ and the other 18$
1 managed database
Spaces

Total cost is 50$/month. I would love to have the worker node be small (6$/month),but I can't figure out if DO allows that.

On top of this, I won't be able to increase availability unless I pay 12$ for the load balancer, sadly.

App requirements:

filesystem for file uploads (at some point, I'll move this to s3-like)
postgres
1gb ram
worker process and web process need to be split to avoid workers using all resources needed to serve web
static file serving and proxy to the main application, I usually use nginx (does it need to be another node?)
ideally the filesystem for file uploads can be shared in some way between worker and web nodes. It needs to be accessible by nginx for serving the files
backups for db and Spaces
https, currently managed by letsencrypt with nginx plugin

Based on this huge wall of text, sorry, I'm not confident it's straightforward to keep price in the same range. 50$/month would be acceptable, but if I had to add a load balancer and a separate node for filesysyem sharing, that would put me at 74$/month which is almost 3 times as of the current price.
On top of that, I'm uncertain about nginx: unless it's provided, I will need to put it on the same node as the main application, or a separate node and pay another 12$,but then

4 views18:28