Moderate to move
AKS on DigitalOcean: what it becomes and what it costs.
On DigitalOcean, AKS becomes DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS). Manifests stay the same; the control plane becomes yours on Hetzner, or the destination’s managed Kubernetes elsewhere. Nodes are already in the Virtual Machines line.
Effort grade
Moderate
Same software, self-hosted: you patch, back up and fix it
Cost after the move, before engineer time
25% of today
This line is the Standard tier control-plane fee ($73/mo per cluster); nodes bill under Virtual Machines. Three CX23 for a k3s control plane are €16.5 ≈ $19, about 25%.
Engineer time
6 h a month
To run the replacement: patching, backups, on-call. Plus about 5 engineer days for the move itself.
Your own AKS line, from your export
Drop one month of your Azure cost export and the report prices every service, AKS included, on DigitalOcean list prices of 18 Oct 2026, net of the engineer time to run it. In your browser; nothing is uploaded.