Around April of 2017 I wrote this article about moving my side project to a single-node Kubernetes cluster: https://hackernoon.com/lessons-learned-from-moving-my-side-project-to-kubernetes-c28161a16c69 As of today, the infrastructure is still running strong, although I’ve run into a few issues I will talk about later in this article. I initially set up my node as a $10/month node but it was barely not powerful enough. Since then, Digital Ocean seems to have roughly doubled the CPU/memory for each of its instances, so $10 might work out.

This title may already be ringing some faint alarm bells; why move a small side project to use Kubernetes? And was it worth it? I run a small study site for tournament Scrabble players, available at https://www.aerolith.org. (Please excuse the lack of a nice landing page). It consists of a Django app, with PostgreSQL, and a small Go-based microservice that generates some complex word challenges on demand. The reason that service uses Go instead of Python had mainly to do with performance, but partially I was also experimenting with Go at the time.