You can run Kubernetes on AWS without EKS and if you use t2.micro instances it would be around $28 per month if you use the load balancing technique here (where

You can run Kubernetes on AWS without EKS and if you use t2.micro instances it would be around $28 per month if you use the load balancing technique here (where it is DNS based on an actual LB). $21 a month if you account for the free tier (and this article uses Google's free tier). If you further use spot instances (the equivalent here to "preemptible") you can save a ton more. The real savings (or $7 per month) is that on GCE you won't need to run your control server. GCE does that for you for free. Edit: now another issue here is (and I have no idea if this is true for GCE like it is AWS). t2 instances will throttle you if you use too much CPU which can be an issue when running a lot of containers.