Kubernetes container cluster conventions

Question

I have been trying out kubernetes on GCP to build microservices for a while and it has been amazing so far.

Although i am a bit confused on what would probably be the best approach, should i

1. create ( gcloud container clusters create "[cluster-name]" ... ) one container-cluster per service?
2. create one container-cluster for multiple services? or
3. do both of those above depending on my situation?

all of the examples i have managed to find has only covered #2, but my hunch is kind of telling me that i should do #1, and my hunch is also kind of telling me that i have probably missed some basic understanding around containers, i have been trying to find answers without any luck, i guess i just can't figure out the right search keyword, i am hoping that i could find some answer here.

Answer 1

I suspect the answer is "it depends" (Option 3)

How isolated do you need each application to be? How much redundancy (tolerance of VM failure) do you need? How many developers will have access to the Kubernetes cluster? How much traffic do the apps generate?

If in doubt I recommend running all your apps on a single cluster. Simpler to manage and the overhead in providing highly available infrastructure is then shared. You'll also have greater levels of VM utilization, which perhaps might result in reduced hosting costs. The latter is a subjective observation, some apps have very little or occasional traffic resulting in very bored servers :-)