I have been researching k8s lately. I am a bit confused by the idea of self managing k8s cluster in the cloud. I have read about people doing it, but still I am not sure what are the price benefits if you are already running services on VMs in the cloud.
GKE makes you pay only for your nodes and it manages your master nodes out of the box.
Are there some hidden costs for the managed clusters that are not mentioned? Will you self manage your cluster if you are already running services in the cloud and you will most probably pay the same if you migrate them in k8s?
I know it really depends based on your services and needs but lets imagine the most basic CRUD application - 1 stateless backend running a few replicas, 1 stateful db running one replica for HA purposes, 1 message broker and a few worker instances for background processing. You do not have bare metal machines, you are already running in the cloud on basic VMs, without containers. Will there be any good reason to migrate to self managed k8s cluster price wise?