Not sure yet which platform to choose? Read it first in OpenShift vs Kubernetes: what fits; the path you choose is the number-one factor in your cost.
The cost depends on the path
Managed cloud (EKS, GKE, AKS)
The provider operates the control plane (sometimes free, sometimes for a low per-cluster fee) and you pay for the compute nodes, storage and networking you consume, plus the team that operates the platform. It is predictable and elastic, but the bill grows with usage, and "managed" covers the control plane, not security, observability or governance: that remains yours.
- Where the money goes: cloud infrastructure consumption + platform team.
- Best for: companies already in the cloud that grow elastically.
Red Hat OpenShift
You add a license/subscription cost (usually per node, core or socket) that includes 24/7 enterprise support. In exchange, you save on what you don't have to build or integrate: security, CI/CD, console, registry and management come included. For regulated organizations, that package usually comes out cheaper than assembling and maintaining everything on your own.
- Where the money goes: licenses + support; less spending on people and scattered tools.
- Best for: banking, government, healthcare, hybrid and multi-cloud.
VMware Tanzu / VKS
The cost is incremental on top of your existing VMware investment. It only makes sense if you already have VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF); in that case, you leverage licenses and a team you already pay for. Setting up VMware from scratch just for Kubernetes is rarely worthwhile.
- Where the money goes: VMware licenses (if you don't already have them) + operation.
- Best for: those who already operate on VMware.
Do-it-yourself: vanilla Kubernetes, K3s or Rancher
The software license is free, but the cost shifts entirely to people: installing, securing, updating, monitoring and responding to incidents. K3s (a lightweight distribution) and Rancher (a multi-cluster management layer) are excellent for edge, small teams or test environments, but "free" in licensing does not mean "cheap" in operation.
- Where the money goes: 100% on people and operation time.
- Best for: teams with high technical maturity, edge or focused cases.
Your starting point also has a cost
Where you come from matters as much as where you are going:
- Migrating from Docker Compose or traditional servers: add professional containerization and migration services. We cover this in containers.
- From on-premise to the cloud: add architecture redesign and, sometimes, temporary costs of running in parallel.
The cost that doesn't go away: operating your workloads
Whichever path you choose, there is a cost no provider or managed service takes away: operating your own applications. Defining requests and limits, deploying, securing and monitoring your workloads is work that always exists —on EKS, on ROSA, on VKS or on a self-managed cluster. What the provider manages is the platform, not your business running on top (we explain it in detail in the platforms guide). The only question is who takes on that cost: an in-house team you have to hire and retain, or a managed-services partner with a predictable operating cost.
The four components of the cost
Whatever the path, your investment breaks down into:
- Infrastructure — compute, storage, networking (in the cloud or your data center).
- Platform / licenses — from $0 (DIY) to enterprise subscriptions (OpenShift, VMware).
- People — the most expensive and most underestimated component. Platform engineers with Kubernetes experience are scarce and expensive, and hard to retain.
- Ongoing operation — maintaining, updating, securing and responding to incidents, 24/7. Here you decide between operating in-house or with a managed service.
What costs and isn't platform: the team around Kubernetes
The cloud bill or the license is the easy part to quote. What really drives TCO —and almost never appears in the first quote— are the human capabilities that Kubernetes demands around it. Spinning up a cluster is not enough: you need people to operate it and, above all, people who know how to build software for it.
- Platform engineering / SRE. Someone has to operate the cluster: updates, capacity, networking, security and incident response. These are scarce and expensive profiles.
- DevOps and CI/CD. Kubernetes without automation is a double-edged sword. You need pipelines, GitOps and repeatable deployments; building and maintaining them is a role in itself.
- Developers with a cloud-native mindset. This is the most underestimated cost. Your developers must know how to build applications for containers: stateless apps, health checks, well-defined requests and limits, configuration and secrets handling, and observability from the code itself. A team that "throws its monolith into a container" without this produces apps that go down, over-consume and are impossible to operate. That is why the CKAD (Certified Kubernetes Application Developer) certification exists, specific to developers.
- Security (DevSecOps). Image scanning, policies and secrets management integrated into the pipeline: it is continuous work, not a checkbox.
Add to that the costs that "get lost in the details": the training of the current team, the ramp-up time (months of lower productivity while they learn), the on-call rotations and the process change that DevOps implies. None of this is platform, and it all costs money.
Where we help. At Andes Digital we arrive with the team and capabilities already in place: we have CKAD-certified professionals for container development, plus the company-level KCSP certification (the only one in South America) that backs our platform operation. Instead of hiring, training and retaining each of these profiles from scratch —the slowest and riskiest cost of all— you add a team that already has them. Learn about our DevOps and CI/CD and managed Kubernetes services.
The hidden costs no one quotes
- Downtime: every hour a critical system is down costs in sales, SLAs and reputation. A well-implemented platform pays for itself by avoiding outages.
- Talent turnover: if your platform depends on one or two people and they leave, the replacement cost and knowledge loss are enormous.
- Lock-in: choosing poorly can force a costly migration years later. Designing for portability reduces that risk (see OpenShift vs Kubernetes).
- Security technical debt: what isn't secured from the start gets paid for —dearly— in an audit or an incident.
How to lower TCO (total cost of ownership)
- Don't over-size: start with a focused scope that delivers early value and grow from there, instead of one big monolithic project.
- Automate operations: GitOps and CI/CD reduce the cost of people over the long term. We do it in DevOps.
- Evaluate the managed model: a managed service turns a hard-to-hire fixed team cost into a predictable operating cost. Learn about our managed services.
- Choose the platform well from the start: the most expensive mistake is migrating platforms because of a poor initial decision.
An example of consolidation that reduced cloud spending: we migrated IPS's applications to a single Kubernetes cluster (Tanzu) on Azure, eliminating service sprawl and reducing Azure App Service costs. See it in IPS: microservices on Azure.
Why discuss it with the only KCSP in South America
Estimating cost well requires having done it many times, across different paths and sectors. Andes Digital is the only Kubernetes Certified Service Provider (KCSP) in South America and a partner of Red Hat, VMware, AWS and Google Cloud. We help you estimate the real TCO of each option for your case —not just the license— and choose the path that minimizes your total cost, not the one we'd profit from selling.