kubernetes
Production-Grade Container Scheduling and Management
The Lens
Kubernetes is the operating system for that. It takes your containers and distributes them across a cluster of machines, handles networking between them, restarts crashed processes, and scales up when traffic spikes.
What's free: Everything. Apache 2.0 license. The entire Kubernetes project is free and open source: API server, scheduler, controller manager, kubelet, kubectl. No enterprise edition, no gated features.
Kubernetes won. Every cloud provider offers a managed version, every DevOps engineer is expected to know it. The ecosystem (Helm, Istio, Argo, Prometheus) is massive. If you're building cloud-native infrastructure, K8s is the platform everything else runs on.
The catch: complexity. Kubernetes has a brutal learning curve. A production cluster needs monitoring, logging, ingress controllers, cert management, RBAC policies, network policies, storage classes. The list doesn't end. Running your own control plane is a full-time job. Most teams should use a managed service (EKS, GKE, AKS) and even then, you need someone who understands K8s deeply.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
fully free### What's Free Everything. The entire Kubernetes project is Apache 2.0 licensed. No paid tier, no enterprise edition. Every feature CNCF ships is free.
### Self-Hosting Cost (Running Your Own Control Plane) - **Home lab/dev**: Minikube or kind on your laptop. $0. - **Small production**: 3 control plane + 3 worker nodes. On bare VPSes: $60-180/mo. - **Medium production**: 5+ nodes with monitoring, logging, and ingress. $200-1,000/mo. - **You're also paying for**: monitoring (Prometheus/Grafana), logging (Loki), ingress (nginx), cert-manager, etc.
### Managed Kubernetes (What Most Teams Should Use) - **EKS (AWS)**: $0.10/hr (~$73/mo) per cluster + EC2 node costs. - **GKE (Google)**: Free tier for 1 Autopilot cluster. Standard: $0.10/hr per cluster. - **AKS (Azure)**: Free control plane. You pay only for nodes. - **DigitalOcean**: $12/mo for the control plane + $12+/mo per node.
### The Real Cost Kubernetes itself is free. The infrastructure to run it is not. And the engineering time to operate it is the biggest cost of all. A team spending 20 hours/month on K8s ops at $100/hr = $2,000/mo in labor. Managed services reduce this dramatically.
### When Self-Hosting Makes Sense Almost never for the control plane. Use managed K8s. Self-host only if you're on bare metal, have compliance requirements, or are running at massive scale where managed service fees add up.
Software is free. Managed clusters cost $12-73/mo for the control plane plus node costs. The real expense is engineering time to operate it.
Similar Tools
License: Apache License 2.0
Use freely. Patent grant included.
Commercial use: ✓ Yes
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- Kubernetes (Organization)
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