Sunsetting Contabo
For a little over a year, I've been running Kubernetes via Talos Linux on Contabo VPSes.
I originally chose Contabo because it was the cheapest provider that Talos Linux images worked out-of-the-box with. At the time, I also found value in having unreliable nodes to passively test the resilience of high availability setups.
However, as my workloads grew, Contabo stopped being a good fit. The biggest problem was absurdly high steal times (>90%!) causing timeout issues, especially with systems that must maintain consensus (e.g. Longhorn volume replication, etcd, Kafka). Additionally, the network bandwith was limited to 100Mb/s, which meant aggressive downsampling of metrics and logs, which was at odds with my desire to add even more instrumentation via ebpf, with tools like Parca.
I'm not going to pretend this wasn't a significant amount of work. In total, this was a 12-node cluster spanning three control planes and nine workers, managing ~70 vCPUs, ~200GB RAM, and 6.2TB of storage across three separate node pools.
So, before I close this chapter, here's how my setup progressed:
Backlinks