I did a post on installing DC/OS a few years back. I was going to follow up with a K8s post, but between the official Ansible scripts, the (at the time) very al

I did a post on installing DC/OS a few years back. I was going to follow up with a K8s post, but between the official Ansible scripts, the (at the time) very alpha kubeadm, broken pod logging and WeaveNet that would constantly fail with no logs, I ended up giving up on that post: https://penguindreams.org/blog/installing-mesosphere-dcos-on-small-digital-ocean-droplets/ https://penguindreams.org/blog/installing-mesosphere-dcos-on... I remember the manual-ish server provisioning days of Autoyast and RedHat's Kickstart. It's not that difficult to bootstrap physical servers to get them to the point of being nodes in a Docker scheduling system. Rancher is another great tool for setting up K8s (which you can run against physical nodes once you get them past the initial install/bootstrap). I worked at one place where they took a hybrid approach. They had DC/OS running in the local VMWare data center (which we were migrating to from AWS to save costs), but there were nodes that could scale to AWS as well and you could label your deployments for which data center you needed them to run in. A lot of high volume loads we were able to move back to our data center, but we also had a kick-ass platform team and our AWS bill was well over $150k/month. The trouble is it's almost impossible to do a real cost comparison. There are just too many factors, and when you start going AWS, GCE or Azure, you start using all their other managed services that may not have self-hosted replacements, not to mention off-setting the costs of setting up master/slaves, backups, snapshots, redundancy and other operations tasks that come by default or with an additional price from a hosted solution.