Image: from DigitalOcean’s website
Yesterday, I decided to try out DigitalOcean’s Kubernetes. As always with DigitalOcean, the solution is straightforward and easy to use.
Similarly to Azure, their managed Kubernetes product is free. You only pay for the compute of the agent nodes, persistent block storage and load balancers. The minimum price is 10$ per month for a single-node cluster with a 2GB and 1 vCPU node (s-1vcpu-2gb). Not bad at all!
At the moment, the product is in limited availability. The screenshot below shows a cluster in the UI:
Multiple node pools are supported, a feature that is coming soon to Azure’s AKS as well.
My cluster has one pod deployed, exposed via a service of type LoadBalancer. That results in the provisioning of a DigitalOcean load balancer:
Naturally, you will want to automate this deployment. DigitalOcean has an API and CLI but I used Terraform to deploy the cluster. You need to obtain a personal access token for DigitalOcean and use that in conjunction with the DigitalOcean provider. Full details can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/gbaeke/kubernetes-do. Note that this is a basic example but it shows how easy it is to stand up a managed Kubernetes cluster on a cloud platform and not break the bank
baeke.info 