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Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster management fee on June 6

cloud.google.com

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Re: Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster management fee on June 6

#131

Post by takeda »

pojzon wrote: post #107
tmpz22 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too many people drank the cloud kool-aid. The move from day one was to create provider agnostic cloud architectures and repent the use of provider-specific services. That said they do make it damn hard. Our k8s cluster is as basic as it comes, no databases, simple deployments, but we do still have a dependency on Google Cloud Loadbalancer (which we hate). If pricing goes up too much from this we'll move, but the GCL…

How about managing own k8s running on VMs / bare-metal? Pretty much anyone who works in ops longer understood from the go that its impossible to be totally provider-agnostic. K8S is just a nice api on top of provider api that still requires provider specific configuration.

From what I've seen looks like managing k8s on your own often ends up requiring a dedicated team to keep with their insane release cycle.

Re: Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster management fee on June 6

#132

Post by [deleted] »

sethvargo wrote: post #114
jchiu1106 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Seth, I know you used to work at Hashicorp on vault. I think Vault recommends that if you want to deploy it on Kubernetes, it should have the cluster to itself.

That's correct. Vault Enterprise (at my last math) was ~$125k/yr, so that management cost is negligible :)

[deleted]

Re: Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster management fee on June 6

#133

Post by numbsafari »

sethvargo wrote: post #4

Hey everyone - Seth from Google here. Please let us know if you have any questions! You can learn more about the pricing changes at https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/pricing .

Hey Seth,

Thanks for being the recipient of everyone's (justifiable) frustrations. They probably don't pay you enough.

I think, what is especially frustrating about this, is that we do already pay for resources that are provisioned by our K8S clusters. We pay for the network traffic, the storage, the compute. I saw you mention StackDriver... we pay for that as well.

I can appreciate that actually setting up and managing GKE backplanes is a non-trivial expense, but I generally assumed that that cost was amortized out, just like I don't pay for the backplane that runs GCE and the rest of GCP's service suite.

I also appreciate that you mention some customers are perhaps taking advantage of this "free" resource. But, isn't that quotas are for?

Frankly, more concerning than the fact that now I have a new $73/mo. fee attached to my account (which, is not the end of the world) is that this really comes out of left field, and in the context of concerns about the the nature of GCP's new leadership, and reports of Google leadership debating GCP as a going concern. I realize a lot of that isn't well founded, but it's surprises like this one that keep that narrative alive. AWS ain't no saint, but they are pretty consistently who they are: not full of bad surprises.

This just leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and makes me wonder if I can expect other surprising cost increases, or perhaps, if these don't "work", worse surprises like deprecation notices. Is this the precursor to you all discontinuing GKE because, as the DevRel class likes to tweet, nobody should be using Kubernetes if they can use (more expensive) services like Cloud Run?

Are we about to get Oracled?

Re: Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster management fee on June 6

#134

Post by agoell »

Just received an email from Google Cloud -

"On June 6, 2020, your Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters will start accruing a management fee, with an exemption for all Anthos GKE clusters and one free zonal cluster.

Starting June 6, 2020, your GKE clusters will accrue a management fee of $0.10 per cluster per hour, irrespective of cluster size and topology.

We’re making some changes to the way we offer Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Starting June 6, 2020, your GKE clusters will accrue a management fee of $0.10 per cluster per hour, irrespective of cluster size and topology. We’re also introducing a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that’s financially backed with a guaranteed availability of 99.95% for regional clusters and 99.5% for zonal clusters running a version of GKE available through the Stable release channel. Below, you’ll find additional details about the new SLA and information to help you reduce your costs."

Re: Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster management fee on June 6

#135

Post by londons_explore »

Are there any other companies doing managed Kubernetes in GCP?

If there was interest I could try to build a third party clone of GKE running in all GCP regions and still managing GCP VM's, and I could run it for a lot less than $0.10 per hour (although obviously it would take many months of refinement till I could offer a decent SLA)

Re: Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster management fee on June 6

#136

Post by sethvargo »

mleonard wrote: post #126
sethvargo wrote: post #4

Hey everyone - Seth from Google here. Please let us know if you have any questions! You can learn more about the pricing changes at https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/pricing .

Very disappointed. Not by the price increase per se... but by the lack of a reasonable 'always free tier'. I think you should strongly consider tweaking the pricing to provide one or two or three multi-zone clusters for free instead of one single-zone cluster. Let us see the power of GKE without the extra charge and grow on your platform. This would allow new companies to choose gcp over aws/azure and start out with…

I think you'd be interested in our Google Cloud for Startups program: https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups

Re: Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster management fee on June 6

#137

Post by marvinblum »

sphix0r wrote: post #124
marvinblum wrote: post #116

We moved our cluster into the Hetzner Cloud for Emvi [1]. Yes, they don't offer a managed solution and it took us about two weeks to set up and test the cluster properly. But the cost is less than 1/6 of what gcloud costs us. If you have the resources and knowledge to maintain your own cluster, check it out. They have insanely good pricing (2,96 €/month for the cheapest instance which is faster than Googles $15/month…

Hetzner is solid from a perf / price perspective. Mind that the network peering outside Europe is not that great. So could be a very good choice depending on your user base' location.

True. In our experience it's fast enough. Additionally traffic is free unless you hit the 20 TB outgoing traffic per node (which probably will never happen to us). In contrast gcloud costs about 12ct per GB outgoing traffic (!!!).

Re: Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster management fee on June 6

#138

Post by numbsafari »

lain wrote: post #15

That's about $72 a month, which matches Amazon EKS's lowered pricing. I guess that rules out my hopes of EKS not charging for the management plane in the near future.

I mean... if I were Amazon, I'd eliminate those management fees this afternoon just to spite them. I'm sure it's a rounding error as far as AWS is concerned.

Re: Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster management fee on June 6

#139

Post by cmhnn »

rolleiflex wrote: post #120
cmhnn wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for technical tangent but curious. Your decision making on GCP appears to appeal to best of breed + cost. But you put SQL Server on AWS? If you are saying SQL Server is better on AWS than on Azure it would be interesting to learn why.

We need MySQL 8 because of window functions, which GCP does not offer. That is available on AWS.

My bad. A clever marketing decision made me see the capital SQL as SQL Server since I am used to people saying Postgres, MySQL or SQL.

Re: Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster management fee on June 6

#140

Post by notyourday »

sethvargo wrote: post #10
jerendy92 wrote: post #8

Time to dump GCP then. It's not even that the fee is that large, but rather that this is once again Google failing on a long term commitment and shafting those on their platform once again. This was one of the benefits that was pushed by their sales team when they called us up to market GCP over AWS and their EKS offering. Doesn't matter that they are price matching, Google's inability to actually commit to long term…

Thank you for the feedback. > Google's inability to actually commit to long term support... This is _exactly_ what Google is doing in this case. We are providing an SLA - a legal agreement of availability and support. These changes introduce a guaranteed availability of the management control plane.

> We are providing an SLA - a legal agreement of availability and support.

Do I still have to pay the bill first, fill out forms, get account managers involved, at some point receive a partial credit, and repeat this until the delta between what I was expected as the SLA credit and what I got as the SLA credit is less than the cost of the time to fight for another cycle?

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