Deploying Kubernetes Clusters on OpenStack: An Alternative to AWS EKS
Why VMs make more sense than bare metal for Kubernetes and distributed architecture, and where the cost and operational trade-offs come from.
Self-managed Kubernetes on OpenStack can save on engineering budget and provide API-driven provisioning, private networking, and Terraform tooling. A three-node k3s cluster costs around $346/month, while a comparable EKS setup costs about $914/month. The OpenStack-based approach uses VMs instead of bare metal for better flexibility, simplicity, and failure recovery.
The stack consists of compute servers, Kubernetes (k3s), an API endpoint, and an ingress layer. Memory is the key factor in cost, and Memory Optimized flavors offer the cheapest RAM. Three flavors (general, CPU optimized, and shared pool) were considered, with the combined layout chosen for simplicity. Nodes run k3s in server mode, staying on a private network with Cloudflare for HTTPS ingress.
The architecture offers public IPs only when needed, security groups outside the guest, and automatic host reboots in case of hardware failures.
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