Cost Optimization

'Don't use Kubernetes until you have a platform team' was good advice in 2019. The premises changed. What a two-to-six person company should set up in week one, what to deliberately skip, and what it actually costs: about zero.

On June 15, Hetzner raised cloud prices, with some instance families more than doubling. A worked-numbers look at what a production Kubernetes cluster costs now, and why the real lesson is portability, not provider loyalty.