The short answer: for EU workloads, pick a provider where the control plane AND the worker nodes sit in EU datacenters under EU jurisdiction, where you can predict the monthly bill from the node count, and where an idle cluster does not quietly burn money. On RareCloud, a managed 3-node starter cluster costs €44.97 per month (3 x g-2vcpu-8gb workers), the control plane is included, and idle clusters can hibernate.
Why does "EU Kubernetes" mean more than a datacenter pin?
Three separate things hide behind the label:
- Data residency: your etcd state, volumes and backups physically live in the EU.
- Jurisdiction: the operating company answers to EU law, which is what GDPR processors care about.
- Billing reality: EUR invoices with correct VAT treatment, so finance does not bounce them back.
US hyperscalers' EU regions give you the first. European providers give you all three. RareCloud's cloud region runs on our own OpenStack hardware in Bucharest, operated by an EU company, invoiced in EUR with EU VAT.
What should a managed control plane cost?
Hyperscalers charge for the control plane itself (EKS and GKE bill it per hour). Most European providers include it and charge only for workers.
RareCloud includes the managed control plane. You pay the sum of your worker nodes, period. Our clusters run on Gardener, the open-source Kubernetes-as-a-service engine originally built at SAP, which gives every cluster a managed, self-healing control plane without a per-cluster fee.
How do I estimate the real monthly bill?
Count nodes, multiply, add storage:
- Worker node g-2vcpu-8gb: €14.99 per month each (hourly billed, capped)
- 3-node starter cluster: €44.97 per month
- Block storage volumes: billed per GB per hour, only while attached to something
Hourly billing with a monthly cap means scaling down mid-month actually saves money, and scaling up for a launch weekend costs cents, not a month of fees.
What is cluster hibernation and why care?
Staging clusters spend most of their life idle. Gardener-based platforms can hibernate a cluster: workers are released, the control plane state is preserved, and waking it restores the cluster as it was. On a postpaid hyperscaler, the equivalent is an engineer remembering to tear things down on Friday.
When is a plain VPS the better answer?
Honest answer: often. If you run one application with a database and a reverse proxy, a €3.99 cloud server with Docker Compose will be simpler, cheaper and easier to debug than any cluster. Kubernetes earns its complexity when you have multiple services, rolling deploys, horizontal scaling or a team that already speaks it. We sell both, so we have no incentive to push you to the expensive one.
Frequently asked questions
Is the control plane really free? You pay for worker nodes only; the managed control plane is part of the product. If you want a highly-available control plane for production, that is an optional €30/month add-on.
Can my AI tooling manage the cluster? Cluster lifecycle is exposed through the same REST API and console as everything else, with scoped tokens; kubeconfig access works with any standard tooling.
How resilient is the platform? Clusters run on Gardener's self-healing control plane and our cloud is built for high availability, with worker nodes you can spread across zones. We don't dress this up as a contractual uptime guarantee.