HACKER Q&A
📣 sbussard

Why are load balancers so expensive?


If it wasn't for kubernetes, I probably wouldn't care about load balancers in my personal projects. But since things are the way they are, why do load balancers have to cost so much?


  👤 Keverw Accepted Answer ✓
Probably depends on the provider... Haven't played much K8...

But I know it seems with clouds they offer regular VPSes, but can get managed databases, load balancers, etc... I guess cost more than setting it up on your own raw VPS, but less op's tasks...

Personally I'd probably just install something like HAProxy on a VPS. Smaller VPS but as growing scale it up on a larger VPS.

I guess though load balancers are prefect for stateless stuff, but websockets sounds more messy. My plan was if I ever used web sockets load balance in the application level itself... like ws1.whatever, ws2.whatever and just assign them a session token and a specific server to connect to. So stateless REST API and a separate stateful WS servers.