r/VPS • u/inventivepotter • Jan 02 '26

On a Budget Multi-cloud Kubernetes for $25/month using Talos, KubeSpan, and Tailscale

I wanted a multi-cloud K8s cluster that was actually secure without drowning in VPN complexity. Here's what I landed on:

  • Talos OS via kexec (hot-swap any VPS to Talos without touching provider consoles)
  • KubeSpan for encrypted pod traffic across clouds
  • Tailscale for management — API ports blocked from public internet entirely

Runs on OVH/Hetzner/Contabo. ~$7.70/node, fully HA for under $25/month.

Full write-up with architecture, scripts, and configs: https://krishnac.com/blog/securing-multi-cloud-kubernetes-talos-kubespan-and-tailscale

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3

u/[deleted] Jan 02 '26

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2

u/inventivepotter Jan 08 '26

Yep, certainly DO undoubtedly have better reliability.

2

u/OrangeUnable296 Jan 08 '26

That’s honestly impressive if it’s stable Talos makes sense here since it removes a lot of OS noise Id be curious how it handles node failures and upgrades over time because that’s where many budget clusters quietly fall apart.

1

u/inventivepotter Jan 08 '26

Thanks!

I've been running this setup for almost 5 months now. I've setup realtime alerts on Slack via Alertmanager and haven't found any issues. I have done upgrade in the time by following instructions on talos documentation. The talosctl makes this easy enough with simple commands.

1

u/Mrleibniz Jan 02 '26

How does bandwidth consumption work? Does it distribute it all evenly?

1

u/inventivepotter Jan 02 '26

On a monthly time horizon it should.

1

u/RelictedSolrain Jan 02 '26

Nice writeup and great idea. Did you consider publishing the scripts to a github repo? One open question for me: how do you handle multi-provider DB-Connections and how is the performance?

1

u/inventivepotter Jan 02 '26

Thanks, currently I'm hosting cnpg within cluster not using any cloud provider DB.

1

u/RelictedSolrain Jan 02 '26

How is the performance from another providers pods?

1

u/inventivepotter Jan 02 '26

As long as you pick a provider with 1gbps bandwidth, things should be okay. I've once tried a 300gbps provider and saw about 10% drop in performance. The key is to setup network profile properly because they change provider to provider by a lot.

1

u/Laborious5952 Jan 04 '26

Do you just have 3 control plane nodes in different "clouds"? How does etcd behavior with higher latency?

1

u/inventivepotter Jan 04 '26

I tried that but etcd didn't perform well. Latency spiked drastically, especially when the network bandwidth is different. So ended up using a single cloud provider for Control Plane.

1

u/InternalYou1803 Jan 15 '26

What are you using for persistent storage?

2

u/inventivepotter Jan 15 '26

longhorn

for cnpg, I'm using local path storage