Deploying a cheap managed kubernetes cluster

This terraform code will deploy a 3 node cluster on GKE. It uses the free-tier extensively so should cost a little over $5 a month.

The nodes are 3 f1-micro preemptible VMs each with 10GB of storage. The terraform backend is a GCS bucket, which you could skip and use local instead. Although, you get 5GB free a month and the state file for me was ~18KB...

Preemptible VMs actually aren't in the free tier so you could theoretically run one regular f1-micro for free and then 2 preemptible ones and it would be cheaper.

Getting Started

I recommend following the GCP Terraform getting started guide here. It uses only free resources.

As a note, I had to export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS as the path to my credential file instead of GOOGLE_CLOUD_KEYFILE_JSON which is mentioned in the guide.

Create a Google Cloud Storage Regional bucket this outlines requirements

You'll then need to fill out your own values in terraform.tfvars.example and backend.hcl.example and remove the .example extension.

1. terraform init -backend-config=backend.hcl
2. terraform plan This should output what will be created. Should be a cluster and node pool.
3. terraform apply This will create the resources
4. terraform destroy Don't forget to delete the resources if you don't need them

It takes awhile (like 8mins). It creates a cluster with the default node pool and then deletes it and replaces it with the node pool we specified.

Caveats We disabled logging, monitoring and load balancing. All 3 can add quite a bit of $$$ with load balancing being ~$20 a month.