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

I recently tried to spin up a VM for my own use in AWS, but I had to do a rate increase because I wanted a beefier machine. Easy peasy. My experience was comically bad.

====================== First email from AWS (several days after my request): ======================

Thank you for submitting your Limi Increase request.

I'm contacting your to inform you that we've received your Workspaces Application Manager - Total Products limit increase request, for a max of 5 in the Oregon region. I will be more than happy to submit this request on your behalf.

Please note that for a limit increase of this type, I will need to collaborate with our Service team to get approval. This process can take some time as the Service team must review your request first in order to proceed with the approval. This is to ensure that we can meet your needs while keeping existing infrastructure safe.

You may rest assured I will push towards expediting your request to be addressed as soon as possible. As soon as the Service team contacts me I will definitely let you know by email.

In the meantime, please feel free to let me know if you have any additional questions or concerns and I'll be happy to help!

I appreciate your patience while we evaluate your request.

====================== Second email: ======================

Thank you for your kind patience whiIe we continue to evaluate your Workspaces Application Manager - Total Products limit increase request.

I apologize for the time is taking to provide you with a resolution as we've always aimed to provide our customers with a rewarding experience that meets and goes beyond expectations. Unfortunately, from time to time there are cases where the final outcome is handled by another department and the time they take is completely out of our hands.

We certainly understand the sense of urgency that you have for this particular request and therefore, we have spent time communicating with the service team to let them know about it. Rest assured that your case is active, being looked into and the sense of priority has been transferred. As soon as we have an update from their end we'll be touching base with you immediately.

I am committed ensuring that you will get the help that you need as fast as possible, so we can ensure everything is being handled to your satisfaction, please feel free to let us know if you have any further questions or concerns through this case, so we can address them as soon as possible.

============= My response: =============

You can go ahead and cancel my request -- I've decided to not go forward with my project.

============= Their reply: =============

Greetings from Amazon Web Services.

We're sorry. You've written to an address that cannot accept incoming e-mail.

If you need to contact us, please visit http://www.aws.amazon.com/contact-us .

Thank you for your business.

It's a good program. I'm currently in the stage one step before that program. Would your team consider tweaking the pricing as I mentioned, with the goal of helping early stage startups choose GCP? GKE/kubernetes is increasingly not just for big enterprise. Personally I find GKE as easy as app engine or cloud run but much more future proof and more flexible/powerful... the real heart of a GCP to rival AWS. Just this week I set up Config Connector to provision a global load balancer and other GCP resources used by two clusters. An always free tier of two or three (ideally multi zone clusters) would I think go a long way to earn the trust and belief of many devs and early stage startups. As would coming back in the next few days with tweaked pricing based on community feedback.

Edit: Additional comments: You could limit the number of nodes in the always-free-tier clusters. Above n nodes the free tier clusters aren't free.

With the new pricing, I can't choose to use GKE instead of app engine/cloud run and get the same availability without having to pay for both the nodes and the new control plane cost. Those managed products run over multiple zones in a region. It's disappointing that even just one multi-zone cluster is charged.

According to Canalys, GCP is at 6% cloud market share (in dollars), Azure at 17.4% and AWS at a bit over 32%.

https://www.canalys.com/static/press_release/2020/Canalys---...

AliCloud and Rackspace are very close to GCP as well.

That being said, if you're planning on running Kubernetes, I'd choose GCP over any other offering - the tooling and support just seems better, in my entirely subjective opinion.

If the trade is a SLA for a management fee, that is a reasonable business decision, and largely a rounding error for a decently sized company with a well designed clustering system. Lack of SLAs is a major issue IME with cloud providers.