Amazon is using the same trick with AWS pricing as cellphone providers: they rely on bad math capabilities of their clients. The costs for one single item, in the case of AWS this is one hour of computing, is incredibly low, parts of a cent - but most people out there are not able to do simple maths like multiplication (by 720, the number of hours in a month) or summation (with the costs of the other services you have to implicitly use).
When hosting a simple one-node Kubernetes cluster the costs are easily at a three-figure number per month - the fees for EKS, the fee for the EC2 node, the fee for the inbound load balancer, the fee for storage, ...
Let's do a simple calculation for a Kubernetes cluster:
$58,40 for one EC2 instance (r5a.large, reserved)
$74,40 for EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service)
$9,00 for EBS (Elastic Block Storage)
$20,00 for ELB (Elastic Load Balancer)
... and some minor costs for data transfer and VPC
So even the most simple Kubernetes clusters has costs of around $150 per month - for computing power, open source software and inbound traffic.
We decided to switch to another baremetal provider pretty quick - the costs are $11 for a root server that outperforms the EC2 instance for $60 easily.
Amazon is selling shovels in the gold rush: overpriced computing power for unprepared startups.
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