Alex Spinov

Posted on Mar 25

You Don't Need Kubernetes (Probably)

#docker #discuss #programming #devops

I've seen startups with 3 engineers and 500 users deploy on Kubernetes. The monthly infrastructure bill? $2,400/month. The equivalent on a single $20/month VPS? Same performance.

Kubernetes is incredible technology. But it solves problems that most teams don't have.

When You DON'T Need Kubernetes

Less than 10,000 requests per minute — a $20 VPS handles this easily
Less than 5 services — Docker Compose is simpler and free
Team smaller than 10 engineers — the operational overhead isn't worth it
No auto-scaling requirement — if traffic is predictable, scale manually

What to Use Instead

For 1-3 services: Single VPS + Docker Compose

# docker-compose.yml on a $20 DigitalOcean droplet
services:
  app:
    build: .
    ports: ["8000:8000"]
    restart: always
  postgres:
    image: postgres:16
    volumes: ["pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data"]
  redis:
    image: redis:7-alpine
  nginx:
    image: nginx:alpine
    ports: ["80:80", "443:443"]
volumes:
  pgdata:

Total cost: $20/month. Handles 5,000+ req/min.

For 3-10 services: Docker Swarm

Docker Swarm is built into Docker. No extra installation. It handles:

Rolling deployments
Service discovery
Load balancing
Health checks

docker swarm init
docker stack deploy -c docker-compose.yml myapp

For "I just want it deployed": PaaS

Railway ($5-20/month) — Git push to deploy
Fly.io (free tier) — Global edge deployment
Coolify (free, self-hosted) — Open source Vercel/Heroku

When You DO Need Kubernetes

100+ microservices — Swarm's service mesh can't keep up
Multi-region deployment — Kubernetes + service mesh (Istio/Linkerd)
Strict compliance — Kubernetes has mature RBAC, network policies
Auto-scaling based on custom metrics — HPA + custom metrics API

The Real Cost of Kubernetes

It's not the $200/month managed cluster. It's:

Engineer time: 1-2 engineers spending 20%+ of their time on infrastructure
Debugging: Kubernetes failure modes are complex and hard to diagnose
Learning curve: 6-12 months before your team is truly productive
YAML: So. Much. YAML.

The Decision Framework

Users < 10K → Single VPS ($20/month)
Users 10K-100K → 2-3 VPS + Docker Compose ($60-100/month)
Users 100K-1M → Docker Swarm or managed PaaS ($200-500/month)
Users > 1M → Now consider Kubernetes

Your Experience?

What's the smallest team/project you've seen use Kubernetes? Was it worth it?

I write about infrastructure decisions that save money. More tools →

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