By sgw2129
Bit confused about App platform pricing. It costs $300/month for 4 dedicated cores in an app, but about $120/month for 4 cores (with the same memory) in a managed k8s cluster. I like the general ergonomics of the app platform more than k8s, but that is an enormous price difference…am I misunderstanding or miscalculating?
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Hi there,
There has been a similar discussion here:
The two platforms are fundamentally different I believe. For example, getting an App from GitHub, deployed, with HTTPS, a database, domain names, insights metrics, configuring network between components, load balancing requests, logging, takes about 5 minutes on App Platform.
On Kubernetes, this would prohibitively longer, require a CI/CD pipeline to build an app into a container image then deploy, create something to handle HTTPS certs, add ingress, inject database credentials, configure Prometheus and Grafana for metrics, add something for log aggregation, etc, and that’s just stuff that would be needed to get the K8s cluster ready for an app. After that, the cluster needs to be maintained and all of those services need to be monitored, etc etc etc.
With App Platform, all of these services are managed and monitored so you can focus on your app and not all of the infrastructure required to run it.
With that said, there are absolutely cases where Kubernetes is the right choice, large bandwidth usage is one of them. Though for most apps the bandwidth offered by App Platform is more than sufficient given the amount of time, energy, and money that is saved from managing clusters/supporting infrastructure.
Hope that this helps. Best, Bobby
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