Kubernetes has actually been great
A long time ago, in a land far, far away…and virtual, I used DigitalOcean to host a VPS that served all of my apps.
I moved away from Vercel (ew), Netlify (ew / 2), and some other one I forget that actually allowed you to use a mini-vps; atleast it had a filesystem.
My VPS was a 4 core, 8GB of memory server that used Docker compose to serve my apps after I found out the wonders of Traefik. But, DigitalOcean is expensive! I was paying something like $150 a month just about for a VPS and a managed database.
It was kind of a pain because I’d have to SSH in and introduce some down time while I pulled fresh updates for whichever app needed updating.
Along came this scary little devil - Kubernetes.
I wanted an orchestrator to handle to ups and downs of my apps to minimize downtime as much as possible. I even took the leap to host my own closed off Postgres instance with backups and everything.
It’s really been fun to use once you get passed the, “why is everything broken” phase, but thankfully AI is pretty good at keeping things running and diagnosing issues.
Thinking about it now, I only use kubernetes because I found out that AI can actually do some pretty good stuff. Except for that one time I let it delete etcd and nuked my entire cluster - thankfully I had a backup.
If you use Kubernetes, what do you use it for?
I also use my Kubernetes cluster to host a ton of apps that I can freely use. I like the idea of having apps self-hosted if I can help it, that way maybe my data won’t get hacked and leaked to the Chinese government.
Kubernetes has been fun! You should try it out.
I built my own K8s management app that has really helped me out a ton - Rigel. But, before using my own app, I used Rancher and K9s (you can see more about that here https://fieldnotes.tyrelchambers.com/blog/i-saved-usd150-a-month-by-hosting-my-own-infrastructure/).
I wouldn’t say I’m an evangelist, but using K8s has really made things a breeze as i tighten my CI/CD workflow and the systems around it.
Give it a try!
