Container Orchestration Pricing: What You'll Actually Pay (Spoiler: More Than You Think)

Look, container orchestration pricing is a clusterfuck. I've run most of these platforms in production and here's what actually happens when you try to deploy containers at scale.

Docker Swarm: "Free" Until It's Not

Docker Swarm is the Honda Civic of container orchestration - boring but it mostly works. The catch? When it doesn't work, you're fucked.

Ran a Swarm cluster for three months that worked great until we hit around 50 nodes. Then the overlay network started randomly shitting itself - containers couldn't talk to each other, services disappeared and reappeared like ghosts. Debugging Swarm networking is like trying to fix a car engine while blindfolded and the engine is on fire.

The "free" part stops being true when you factor in:

• At least one DevOps engineer who knows how to unfuck distributed systems ($120k+/year)
• Infrastructure costs that aren't obvious (load balancers, monitoring, backups)
• The opportunity cost of debugging weird edge cases instead of shipping features

Cloud Run: Death by a Thousand Cuts

Google Cloud Run is brilliant until you look at the bill. The pricing model sounds reasonable - pay per request, automatic scaling, no idle costs. In practice, you get nickel-and-dimed to death.

Here's exactly what happened to us: Simple fucking REST API, maybe 100k requests/day. Cloud Run bill? $340/month. Same exact API on a $50 DigitalOcean droplet? Runs fine, uses maybe 10% CPU. Google charges you for CPU time, memory allocation, and request handling like you're renting a Ferrari by the minute to drive to Starbucks.

Cold starts are another hidden cost. Your users suffer through 2-3 second delays while your containers wake up, but you don't see that in the billing console.

ECS: Reasonable Until AWS Gets Creative with Billing

Amazon ECS is actually pretty reasonable for the EC2 launch type. You pay for the underlying instances and ECS orchestration is free. But then you discover data transfer charges.

Moving data between availability zones? That'll be $0.01/GB. Cross-region? $0.02-$0.12/GB. Your containerized microservices talking to each other suddenly generates a $2100/month data transfer bill because AWS counts every packet like they're metering your fucking heartbeat.

ECS Fargate is convenient but expensive. It's like taking Uber everywhere instead of owning a car - fine for occasional use, bankruptcy-inducing for daily commutes. Check out real Fargate pricing examples to see what I mean.

The Real Cost Everyone Ignores

The biggest cost isn't the platform - it's your time. Every platform has its own special way of breaking:

• Swarm's networking randomly shits the bed
• Cloud Run's cold starts murder user experience
• ECS task definitions are YAML hell with a different syntax
• Nomad's documentation assumes you're already a HashiCorp expert

Budget at least 20-40% more than the calculator tells you, and that's assuming you don't get paged at 3am to debug why half your containers disappeared.

Most teams would save money and sanity by just running their shit on regular VMs with Docker Compose until they actually need the complexity of container orchestration.

I've fucked around with most of these platforms. Here's which ones actually work and which ones will ruin your day (and your bank account).

Docker Swarm: When "Free" Costs You Your Sanity

Docker Swarm works great until it doesn't. I ran a 30-node Swarm cluster for six months before I realized I was basically an unpaid Docker support engineer.

What actually breaks in production:

• Overlay networks randomly partition when nodes get busy - got failed to allocate gateway ip in Docker 20.10.14
• Service discovery fails silently, containers return NXDOMAIN for service names
• Rolling updates get stuck at "2/3 nodes updated" and you have to force-restart everything
• No built-in secrets management, so you're storing database passwords in environment variables like a caveman

Real costs for 50-container deployment:

• 5 EC2 instances: $400/month (t3.large, because smaller instances can't handle the networking overhead)
• Application Load Balancer: $25/month (because Swarm's routing mesh is garbage for anything real)
• EBS volumes: $200/month (grows without warning when Docker logs fill up)
• Your weekends debugging networking issues: priceless

Docker's marketing is total bullshit - Swarm doesn't "just work" past 20 nodes. You need someone who can debug iptables and Linux networking at 3am while production burns. Good luck finding that unicorn for less than $140k/year.

ECS: Reasonable Until AWS Discovers Your Wallet

Amazon ECS is actually pretty good if you stick to the EC2 launch type. The ECS service itself is free - you just pay for the underlying instances.

Where AWS gets you:

• Data transfer between AZs: $0.01/GB adds up fast when services are chatty
• EBS snapshots you forgot about: $0.05/GB-month for storage you're not using
• CloudWatch Logs: $0.50/GB ingested (your containers are more verbose than you think)
• NAT Gateway: $0.045/hour + $0.045/GB processed (required for Fargate private subnets)

ECS Fargate hidden gotchas:

• Minimum billing is 1 minute, but containers that crash immediately still cost you
• Windows containers cost 2x more (surprise Windows licensing fees)
• No persistent storage without EFS, which adds another $0.30/GB-month
• Task startup time isn't billed, but it's slow as molasses

Real example from our fucking bill: 12 "microservices" (read: overengineered API endpoints) on Fargate cost us $3,200/month. Same exact containers on 3 EC2 instances? $850/month. Fargate is paying for convenience with your firstborn child.

Cloud Run: Death by a Thousand Tiny Cuts

Google Cloud Run is brilliant for bursty workloads and terrible for everything else.

The billing model that screws you:

• CPU is billed per 100ms increment, memory per second
• Request handling: $0.0000004 per request (sounds small until you hit millions)
• Cold start CPU time is free, but the user experience isn't
• Minimum instance pricing even when idle if you set min-instances > 0

Shit that happened to me in production:

• UptimeRobot bot hit our /health endpoint every 3 seconds, racked up 28,000 requests/day at $0.0000004 each
• Got DDoSed by some script kiddie for 6 hours, Google billed us $1,547 in CPU time while our app returned 500 errors
• Cold starts murdered our API response times - first request after 15 minutes of idle took 3.2 seconds to respond
• Set memory to 1024MB, Node.js garbage collector tried to allocate 1025MB during a spike, container died with OOMKilled

Pro tip: Set --max-instances=100 or you'll accidentally spin up thousands of containers and get a $10k bill.

Azure Container Instances: Like Cloud Run But Worse

Azure Container Instances has all of Cloud Run's billing complexity with none of the reliability.

Unique ways ACI will screw you:

• Windows containers require Windows Server licensing ($0.013/vCPU-second on top of base pricing)
• Virtual network integration costs extra ($0.10/hour per container group)
• Persistent storage requires Azure Files, which is slow and expensive
• No automatic scaling - you manually create/destroy container groups
• Startup time is 30-60 seconds, making it useless for anything user-facing

Tried using ACI for our Jenkins build agents. Half the builds failed with this gem: ContainerGroupNotFound or VirtualNetworkSetupFailed. Azure support ticket response after 72 hours? "Please try recreating the container group." Thanks for nothing, Microsoft.

HashiCorp Nomad: Great If You Like Reading Documentation

HashiCorp Nomad is actually pretty solid, but good luck figuring out how to use it.

Community Edition reality:

• Works well if you can get it configured (big if)
• Documentation assumes you're already using Consul, Vault, and the entire HashiCorp ecosystem
• Zero handholding - you're expected to understand distributed systems
• No commercial support, so StackOverflow is your best friend

Enterprise Edition sticker shock:

• Starts at $3k/month for small clusters
• Pricing scales with nodes, not containers
• Most features you need are enterprise-only (ACLs, namespaces, multi-region)

Took us 2 months to get Nomad 1.4.3 working with Consul 1.14.2. Two months of Marcus, our $140k/year senior engineer, screaming at HCL config files and trying to figure out why jobs stayed in pending state with no error messages. Once it worked? Rock solid as hell. But paying someone $23k in salary to read HashiCorp documentation for 2 months costs more than ECS Fargate would have for 3 years.

The Nuclear Option: Just Use VMs

Here's the truth nobody wants to admit: most applications don't need container orchestration.

A $200/month VPS with Docker Compose will handle more traffic than your app will ever see. Add a second server for redundancy and you're still under $500/month.

Container orchestration makes sense when you have:

• 50+ engineers who need to deploy independently
• Services that need to scale from 1 to 1000 instances dynamically
• Compliance requirements that demand fine-grained resource isolation
• More money than sense

If you're a startup burning through funding on container orchestration instead of features, you're doing it wrong.