cluster-api-provider-hetzner VS free-tier-gke

Hetzner Cloud is officially supported, but that means setting up VPSs in Hetzner's Cloud offering, whereas this project was intended as a more or less independent pure bare-metal cluster. I see they offer Bare Metal support as well, but I haven't dived too deep into it.

I haven't used KubeOne, but I have previously used Syself's https://github.com/syself/cluster-api-provider-hetzner which I believe works in a similar fashion. I think the approach is very interesting and plays right into the Kubernetes Operator playbook and its self-healing ambitions.

That being said, the complexity of the approach, probably in trying to span and resolve inconsistencies across such a wide landscape of providers, caused me quite a bit of grief. I eventually abandoned this approach after having some operator somewhere consistently attempt and fail to spin up a secondary control plane VPS against my wishes. After poring over loads of documentation and half a dozen CRDs in an attempt to resolve it, I threw in my hat.

Of course, Kubermatic is not Syself, and this was about a year ago, so it is entirely possible that both projects are absolutely superb solutions to the problem at this point.

For anyone interested in Kubernetes on Hetzner, there's a really interesting CAPI provider being actively developed:

https://github.com/syself/cluster-api-provider-hetzner

Just a hint running ML Workloads on Hetzner is pretty cheap! You could use for managing k8s: https://github.com/syself/cluster-api-provider-hetzner

we (Syself) release Cluster-API Provider Hetzner v1.0.0-beta.16.

ah okay they come from the upstream cluster-api project. The caph project implements only the infrastructure provider part of Cluster API.

you can easily use it with https://github.com/syself/cluster-api-provider-hetzner

I would use cluster-api-provider-hetzner from Syself.

I think my repo may be just what you're looking for: https://github.com/Neutrollized/free-tier-gke

If you're just looking to play around with k8s, experiment, etc. then you can just leave out piece in your deployment manifests that sets up the load balancer: https://github.com/Neutrollized/free-tier-gke/blob/master/examples/nginx-deployment.yaml <-- notice that there are 2 components here, the first being the deployment of nginx pods (set of 3) and the second is the LB. You can delete the LB half of it and the deployment will still run, you just wouldn't be able to access it publicly and you'd have to do a port-forward and view it locally as mentioned earlier.

I would recommend anyone looking at playing with a cloud-hosted K8s takes a look at this: free tier GKE.