Been working on a web app with a simple database model that only needs CRUD operations, figured MongoDB would be perfect for it. The most important constraints of the project is that it be able to scale from a small amount of users to a large amount. I’ve been looking at the cloud launcher and I’ve noticed that the most popular MongoDB solution advertises a cost of ~$350/mo. This is a surprisingly large amount that makes me consider using cloud sql for my database instead. Is there a better way to deploy MongoDB to GCP that’s more fitted to my use case? I’ve been reading about automatic scaling with kubernetes but I can’t find anything about price. Any and all advice is greatly appreciated
I have lately been working on a similar solution.
GCP announced that they don't charge for Kubernetes cluster management but only for resources used by it (instances, network ...): https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/pricing
In general, databases are high maintenance (data mounts, backups, migrations...), so I would not start running Mongo on Kubernetes right away. You could get there but it will be more complicated than deploying your web app on Kubernetes.
Better to use MongoDB as a service that supports GCP (e.g. MongoDB Atlas), I have done so myself and see a few other companies do that. If you scale gradually you should be able to control your costs.
The web app itself should be easy to deploy and maintain on Kubernetes.
I haven't used mongodb with kubernetes but we do use the cloud launcher solution at work. We use 2 nodes(n1-standard-1) and an arbiter(micro) + 100GB storage on each node which comes up around $100 a month. You would need a replicaset in a production environment so this seems to be a reasonable base cost.
Kubernetes does not provide a lot of advantages over the classic GCE deployment for mongodb compared to a webserver. Setting up a replicaset on kubernetes is a bit more work compared to GCE setup. https://medium.com/google-cloud/mongodb-replica-sets-with-kubernetes-d96606bd9474 and http://blog.kubernetes.io/2017/01/running-mongodb-on-kubernetes-with-statefulsets.html should serve as decent references but wouldn't lower your costs. Scaling nodes would be slightly easier though but does not strictly translate to scaling mongodb.