I will tell you that the economics are most definitely not there. This is a common misconception amongst the HN crowd in general--that public cloud infra is cheaper. For small footprints, public cloud makes sense but once you get into the larger footprints (300+ instances), it's far cheaper to lease dedicated hardware or DIY in colocation. We're running on approximately 40 dedicated rackmount servers for Openstack and 6 for Kubernetes. To get the equivalent amount of disk and RAM, we would pay 2-3x at AWS or GCE. We could probably cut our cost by an additional 30% by moving what we have to colo but we would lose some flexibility and would have to take on additional headcount.

From a maintainability standpoint, GCE makes Kubernetes easy which is a good thing if you've never run it before. It's not that hard to run it yourself, though. A senior-level systems engineer will be a Kube master after about two months of use. Just guessing, I think it takes about 1/4 of an engineer-week to support our Kube cluster for a week. I think we could grow our cluster 20x without a significant workload increase for our ops team.

We are in the process of automating the last few manual aspects of our Kubernetes infra: load balancing and monitoring. We're building these in the style that we've built the rest of our pipeline: YAML files in a project repo. Simply drop your Datadog-style monitoring/metrics config and your load balancer spec in your project's Github repo and the deployment pipeline will build out your monitoring, metrics, and LB automatically for you.