I've been running a background project on Kubernetes for a while now. It's not a project that needs 100% uptime, and neither is it one I wanted to spend a lot of time managing or even checking up on, so Kubernetes with Spot VM's seemed the most cost effective solution, and it's been solid and trouble free. However running a couple of pre-emptible nodes with a managed ingress was still costing $150 a month or so. Way too much for a hobby project.
This article is about retaining the self healing capability you get with Kubernets, but migrating to a much more cost effective (about $40 a month) approach. I found that without Kubernetes in the the mix, i could get away with a single VM, but of course that doesn't give me recovery from pre-emption, so here's how to get that too.
Managed instance group
The transition from a high-cost Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster to a single, highly available Spot VM managed by a Stateful Managed Instance Group (MIG) offers a path to significant cost savings without sacrificing resilience. By leveraging Docker Compose and automated infrastructure orchestration, the platform—comprising microservices such as GraphQL gateways, Elasticsearch processors, and Redis queues—now operates at the lowest possible compute cost while maintaining full recovery capabilities.
