The cost quickly adds up for small underfunded projects though. You also need to factor in how the application does scale. What kind of ingress/load balancing is required. What kind of stateful storage is required. Network policy. Resource monitoring. Config management, CI/CD pipeline. I setup a basic cluster on gke to start but haven’t gotten around to building these just yet. I’ve got a goal of attempting the most performant, scalable, and cheapest instance out there.