Very high load balancing costs for minimal Kubernetes Engine setup on Google Cloud Platform

Question

I am trying to determine the most minimal Kubernetes Engine setup for a simple public facing (public load balanced IP) web app.

I have mine setup as follows:

• 1 Kubernetes Cluster
• 3 f1-micro nodes (at the time 3 was the minimum required for kubernetes, it may now be less?)
• 1 load balancer with a forwarding rule to my External IP

My monthly billing cost is: CA$48.10: half of that being from Compute Engine Network Load Balancing: Forwarding Rule Minimum Service Charge in Americas: 744 Hours CA$23.82

Is there someway to reduce this cost? Or is this truly the cost of a minimal Kubernetes Cluster serving an app with a public domain name?

Answer 1

You can expose you service using other ways, if you do not have to much traffic maybe you don't need a load balancer here is one guide link

Using a NodePort you can use the public IP of one of your nodes, set this IP as static and config your DNS to point at this public IP.

Answer 2

In theory you don't need a load balancer. If you work with nodeports you can connect to that port on the ip of any vm in your cluster. And kubernetes will still load balance internally to the right pod. However, you might have a hard time managing your DNS and firewall settings using this approach. Since I don't believe its possible to give static ip's to kubernetes nodes.