In my previous post, I covered consolidating 20 Load Balancers into one ALB (~$367/month).
But there’s another option: Nginx-Ingress + Cert-Manager inside GKE.
How it works:
Deploy Nginx-Ingress controller with Cert-Manager in your cluster.
One Network Load Balancer in front.
All services route through Nginx, which handles routing and auto-obtains SSL certificates via Let’s Encrypt.
The cost:
- Network LB: ~$25/month (IP + forwarding rule)
- Compute inside GKE: ~$15-30/month (Nginx needs ~0.5-1 vCPU + 512MB-1GB RAM)
- Cert-Manager: practically free
Total: ~$40-55/month for 20 services
Versus managed ALB ($367/month) — 7x cheaper.
Trade-offs:
Managed ALB:
- Direct routing via GCP network to node endpoints (bypasses K8s networking)
- No maintenance
- GCP support
- Higher cost ($367/month)
- Vendor lock-in
Nginx-Ingress:
- Much cheaper ($40-55/month)
- Cloud-agnostic
- All traffic through K8s CNI (CPU overhead, added latency)
- Requires expertise to configure and maintain
- Self-managed complexity
Which do you run?