Hey everyone! 👋 I've been helping my team set up a few small, dedicated Kubernetes clusters for some internal tools and development environments. We're talking tiny scale—maybe 2-5 nodes per cluster, definitely under 10. Our main goal is to keep them simple, stable, and not a huge time-sink to manage.
I've been using k3s and kind for local stuff, but for these cloud-based dev clusters, we're considering AWS EKS. The appeal is obvious: it's managed control plane, integrates nicely with our other AWS services (IAM, VPC, etc.), and we wouldn't have to worry about the masters. But I've also heard it can feel a bit "heavy" and potentially expensive for such small footprints.
So, for those of you running small, non-production EKS clusters:
* What's the real operational overhead like? Is the day-two management (like node updates, add-ons) still a significant chore?
* How do you find the networking (like the CNI choices)? Any gotchas at this scale?
* Does the cost of the managed control plane feel justified for a handful of dev nodes, or does it eat up the budget?
I'm trying to decide if EKS brings enough to the table for our use case, or if we'd be better off with a simpler distribution, even self-managed, given the small size. Would love to hear your hands-on experiences and benchmarks!
Always testing.