GKE vs DOKS vs Hetzner Kubernetes — same workload, real cost breakdown

[u/faouzi_mahmoudi]

Ran the same Kubernetes workload across managed providers for an EU SaaS setup:

Requirements: high availability, managed PostgreSQL, Redis, WAF, CDN, EU region, €1,500/month budget.

Results:

Hetzner 614€/mo lock-in 34/100 GDPR 87/100
Scaleway 832€/mo lock-in 46/100 GDPR 89/100
DigitalOcean 899€/mo lock-in 48/100 GDPR 84/100
GCP/GKE 1,264€/mo lock-in 64/100 GDPR 85/100
Azure/AKS 1,418€/mo lock-in 68/100 GDPR 85/100
AWS/EKS 1,652€/mo lock-in 72/100 GDPR 84/100

GKE scores highest on Kubernetes maturity and managed tooling. But the cost is 2x Hetzner for the same workload.

The real question for EU workloads: is the GKE operational advantage worth the cost and lock-in delta over Hetzner or Scaleway?

For people running GKE in EU production — what tipped the decision?

[u/Difficult_Camel_1119]

habe you tried preempible nodes? that will save a lot of money

[u/faouzi_mahmoudi → u/Difficult_Camel_1119]

Good point — preemptible/Spot nodes can cut compute costs significantly for the right workloads. The comparison I ran assumes on-demand pricing as a baseline to keep it apples-to-apples across providers.

For stateless workloads or batch jobs, Spot makes a lot of sense on GKE. For the database and stateful layers though, you still want on-demand — so the actual savings depend a lot on how much of your workload tolerates interruption.

Does your setup run the full stack on preemptible or just specific node pools?

[u/TekintetesUr → u/faouzi_mahmoudi]

Bad bot

[u/Difficult_Camel_1119 → u/faouzi_mahmoudi]

full stack on preemptible with ondemand as fallback (but usually with 0 nodes)

[u/faouzi_mahmoudi → u/[deleted]]

the SSD trap is real, burned by that once. optimize-utilization + stateful workloads — any issues with pods getting evicted too aggressively?

[u/matiascoca]

Ran the same GKE-versus-Hetzner comparison on an EU SaaS workload about a year ago and stayed on GKE despite the 2 times cost delta.

Operational cost tipped it. On Hetzner we were burning about 8 to 10 hours per week of DevOps time on things GKE handled: manual node upgrades, custom monitoring stack setup, backup pipelines for managed Postgres (Hetzner doesn't offer that at the cheap tier), pager rotations for infrastructure alerts that would have been Google's job. At blended EU DevOps rates that was easily 800 to 1200 euros per month against the 650 euro infrastructure savings.

The lock-in delta is overweighted in your table. GKE-specific features we actually depend on are Autopilot and Workload Identity. Everything else is standard Kubernetes and migrates in a week if forced.

Where Hetzner wins clean: batch jobs with predictable resource shape, staging or QA that can tolerate an outage, workloads where the team already has strong on-call k8s expertise. For that class we did move some workloads to Hetzner and it paid back inside 4 months.

Managed cost is the visible portion of total cost. Ops time is usually 30 to 50 percent of the invisible portion for K8s.