Is managed Kubernetes worth it for small engineering teams?

[morrowine]

Hey folks, curious to hear your takes on this. We’re a small engineering team (just six devs and one ops guy), and we’ve been debating whether to switch from our self-managed Kubernetes setup to a managed one like GKE or EKS. The main issue is time — maintaining clusters is eating up way more hours than expected. But on the other hand, managed services aren’t cheap, and I’m not sure if the trade-off is worth it for such a small group. Has anyone here made that transition?

[ClaraWeltz]

We went through that exact discussion last year. At first, we were dead set on managing everything ourselves — thought it would give us more control and save costs. But the overhead became painful really fast: constant upgrades, patching nodes, and debugging networking issues that were only half our fault. Eventually, we moved to a managed setup with guidance from StackOverdrive Kubernetes Consulting kubernetes consulting services, and honestly, it changed the game for us. They helped redesign our workloads so we didn’t overpay for unused resources and set up autoscaling properly. The bill dropped, and our ops guy could finally sleep again. For small teams, managed Kubernetes is often less about “luxury” and more about freeing people up to actually build product features instead of fighting infrastructure fires.

[morrowine]

Yeah, I’ve seen similar outcomes. When you’re running lean, spending on managed Kubernetes can actually be cheaper long term if it reduces downtime and maintenance hours. Still depends on your workload and release frequency, but totally see why people lean that way.