I am trying to determine the most minimal Kubernetes Engine setup for a simple public facing (public load balanced IP) web app.
I have mine setup as follows:
My monthly billing cost is: CA$48.10: half of that being from Compute Engine Network Load Balancing: Forwarding Rule Minimum Service Charge in Americas: 744 Hours CA$23.82
Is there someway to reduce this cost? Or is this truly the cost of a minimal Kubernetes Cluster serving an app with a public domain name?
This sounds like a better match for AppEngine than Kubernetes.
You can expose you service using other ways, if you do not have to much traffic maybe you don't need a load balancer here is one guide link
Using a NodePort you can use the public IP of one of your nodes, set this IP as static and config your DNS to point at this public IP.
In theory you don't need a load balancer. If you work with nodeports you can connect to that port on the ip of any vm in your cluster. And kubernetes will still load balance internally to the right pod. However, you might have a hard time managing your DNS and firewall settings using this approach. Since I don't believe its possible to give static ip's to kubernetes nodes.