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

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141–150 of 633 posts

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

#141
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this trend is not good overall, and people will eventually be very unhappy with it. I'd rather help you figure out how to use fewer clusters.

Tim, would you be willing to elaborate on why you dislike the "many small clusters" pattern?

Actually, could you elaborate on the benefits of your approach? edit: I am asking because this is counter intuitive to anything I'd want to solve with K8. Specially when it comes as a managed service.

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

#142

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 .

This is really disappointing. I've been a big proponent of GKE not only to my employer but to my friends as well. I think it's the best Kubernetes implementation available. The justification for a management fee b/c there are abusers just feels like an excuse for making some extra revenue. Truly with Google's prowess you can detect and deal with abusers without having to raise cost for everybody. I'm worried this is…

It's not _just_ abuse. It's not _just_ the new SLA. It's also the additional functionality we've built beyond just Kubernetes and how simple we have made the offering and auto-scaling, etc.

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

#143
post #35

Note: Azure does not charge a master/cluster management fee (bias disclosure I work for Microsoft)

Attempting to capitalize on a competitor's announcement isn't cool and doesn't look great.

I don't work for Azure and having used both GKE and AKS, I can say GKE is superior, however, I don't understand why this comment isn't cool. It's not like they're capitalizing on your misery. It's a decision you have taken and it's a fair game IMO that they want to emphasize their advantage over you.

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

#144
post #71

This is awful - I don’t think GCP is fully aware of their position in the market as the second, inferior choice. I took a bet on the underdog by using GCP and they bit me back in return. Especially considering their ‘default’ kubernetes config automatically sets you up with three(!) control planes in replication, that’s, as far as I understand, $~300 added to our monthly bill, for nothing. Oh, and per their docs, thr…

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…

Doing load balance, DNS, and egress has been way uglier in the Google Cloud K8s than I expected. Pushes projects towards doing it themselves in cluster IMO.

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

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seth — I appreciate you being here to take feedback, and for the clarification as well. The very surprising email I’ve received this morning is very hazy on the details, and the docs linked from the email are not updated yet. The main issue is that not charging for the control plane and charging for the control plane leads to two very different Kubernetes architectures, and as per your docs, those decisions made at t…

Thank you These changes won't take effect until June - customers won't start getting billed immediately. I'm sorry that you feel trapped, that's not our intention. > You should keep existing clusters in the pricing model they’ve been built in, and apply this change for clusters created after today. This is great feedback, but clusters should be treated like cattle, not pets. I'd love to learn more about why your clus…

> This is great feedback, but clusters should be treated like cattle, not pets. I'd love to learn more about why your clusters must be so static.

What’s inside our clusters are indeed cattle, but the clusters themselves do carry a lot of config that is set via GCP UI for trivial things like firewall rules. Of course we could script it and automate, but your CLI tool also changes fast enough that it becomes an ongoing maintenance burden shifted from DevOps to engineers to track. In other words, it will likely incur downtime due to unforeseen small issues.

It’s also in you guys’ interest that we don’t do this and clusters are as static as possible right now, since if we are risking downtime and moving clusters, we’re definitely moving that cluster back to AWS.

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

#146

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)

[deleted]

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

#147

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)

Azure and AWS both have managed Kubernetes ...

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

#148
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This highlights a sorta-weird consequence of this pricing change: suddenly pricing incentivizes you to use namespacing instead of clusters for separating environments. (As a security person: ugh.)

That’s interesting - I think you’re right. We might move our staging cluster into our main production deployment. More likely though, AWS or OpenShift running on bare metal on a beefy ATX tower in the office. We want to have production and staging as close to each other as possible, so this is an additional reason and a p0 flag on reducing the dependency on Google-specific bits of Kubernetes as much as possible, hope…

Kubespray works well for me for setting up a bare bones kubernetes cluster for the lab.

I'll use helm to install metallb for the load balancer, which you can then tie into whatever egress controller you like to use.

For persistent storage a simple NFS server is the bees knees. Works very well and a NFS provisioned is a helm install. Very nice, especially, over 10GbE. Do NOT dismiss NFSv4. It's actually very nice for this sort of thing. I just use a small separate Linux box with software raid on it for that.

If you want to have the cluster self-host storage or need high availability then GlusterFS works great, but it's more overhead to manage.

Then you just use normal helm install routines to install and setup logging, dashboards, and all that.

Openshift is going to be a lot better for people who want to do multi-tenant stuff in a corporate enterprise environment. Like you have different teams of people, each with their own realm of responsibility. Openshift's UI and general approach is pretty good about allowing groups to self-manage without impacting one another. The additional security is a double edged. Fantastic if you need it, but annoying barrier to entry for users if you don't.

As far as AWS goes... EKS recently lowered their cost from 20 cents per hour to 10 cents. So costs for the cluster is on par with what Google is charging.

Azure doesn't charge for cluster management (yet), IIRC.

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

#149

This is awful - I don’t think GCP is fully aware of their position in the market as the second, inferior choice. I took a bet on the underdog by using GCP and they bit me back in return. Especially considering their ‘default’ kubernetes config automatically sets you up with three(!) control planes in replication, that’s, as far as I understand, $~300 added to our monthly bill, for nothing. Oh, and per their docs, thr…

> their position in the market as the second, inferior choice Who's the superior choice? EKS?

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

#150
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re in the same situation — we’ve engineered for minimum provider-specific dependencies but GKE LoadBalancers were where they got us via arm twisting as well. There is no way to expose a cluster to the outside world in a production environment otherwise.

It's kind of ridiculous internal load balancers can't get automatic certs. We've had to do a stupid dance just to get certs via the LE DNS challenge out of band, and then regularly install them on internal LBs.

We paid for long-lasting wildcard certs because of that. Which Apple killed a few days ago. It’s going to be fun when they are close to expiry.
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