Digital Ocean dictates what nodes you can add to their Kubernetes service

When one pays money to rent the compute resources from another it should be the customer — not the provider — that decide whether a system can run a workload or not.

Simply put I signed up for the Digital Ocean Kubernetes preview and it worked well. Super easy way to get started with Kubernetes and in my case a great way to run periodic jobs in a secure (using k8s secrets) and repeatable (defining my CRON job in a YAML file and ‘applying’ it to the cluster) way.

My jobs don’t need much in terms of resources so just before DO released this to GA they changed what worker nodes you could add to the cluster. Even though my workload runs like a pig in mud on the 1GB droplet they removed it as an option!

I reached out to DigitalOcean and they basically said they would consider implementing this feature (rubbish it is already implemented!) and that they think the 2GB droplets are “a sweet spot for minimum size”.

Therefore my question is…should the customer decide whether a workload can run on the machine they pay for or should the hosting provider? I have difficulty believing this not another way for Digital Ocean to make another buck or two!