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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

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My approach with any Google b2b product - always have a plan to migrate out of Google and never agree to anything that locks you to Google. After seeing what they did to Google Maps and Api.AI / Dialogueflow jumped from free to 5k$ overnight - just can't trust them.

> never agree to anything that locks you to Google. How is Google different from other cloud poviders in terms of vendor lock-in?

Fair point - yes, I kind of try to avoid it for any provider. But special thing about Google is they are raising prices or worse cancelling or modifying services at will.

For AWS or Azure I developed way more trust over time - could be subjective - but also could be that there is a reason Google is distant 3rd in the game.

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

#222
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He means that there was a sales pitch from all gcp sales guys to not charge for that. 99.95% is not enough IMO to charge 73$/mo. As someone else noted, it breaks a lot of recommended architectures where you would have auto provisioning and a lot of clusters to separate concerns and keep costs down. Finally, the pricing changes are starting to look like a pattern, every time Google deems the usage of a product is good…

EKS only gives you 99.9% uptime, and I'm uncertain as to whether you could achieve more than 99.9% uptime on your own by DIYing your cluster in a public cloud provider without doing multi-region.

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

#223
post #187

This entire kerfluffle is a microcosm of so many things wrong with the industry. First, so many people have decided to use k8 for wrong reasons that is mind boggling. Those are mainly customers. Customers are often led into decisions by their own developers who are more interested in learning new things or in making themselves attractive for the next job. Yes sales people from the providers also help make this happen…

> dick pic app so fuck em. > fucking > shit > horseshit > arrogant fucksteins > crap I'm not usually one to flaunt the HN guidelines, but I would suggest a read-through, and perhaps exploring different venues for venting frustrations.

Which axe are you grinding? If you took this personal then maybe something stuck because it should? If you mean there is no cussing allowed then I missed that for sure.

Edit: ah checked your history. So you say things like "Amazon reviews are about as trustworthy as the selling points of a slimy salesman" thus impugning Amazon and salespeople in general but are coming after me because you are no doubt personally miffed by either previous comments I have made or the ones above because they struck a chord. The guidelines also say basically downvote or flag don't whine and they say don't get political which is an unenforced joke no doubt only meant to apply to those the current moderators dislike.

Bottom line, I found your posts and style criminally boring, your tone here hypocritical and am glad we both get to have an opinion. HAND.

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

#224
post #200

After this, I've been exploring other places to host our team's clusters... copied pricing below - EKS: $0.10/hour/cluster - Digital Ocean: Free (only charges for the nodes) - Azure: Free (only charges for the nodes) In the long run we'll probably try and build our stack on vendor-agnostic tools.. - Rancher - https://rancher.com/products/rancher/ - Infra.app - https://infra.app (mentioned a few weeks back on the Kube…

OVH also offer a free control plane, but their service is relatively beta so far.

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

#225
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't that be opt-in? The management control plane is not something we consider critical to operations. I'd happily accept if it was unavailable for 1 and a half minutes a day versus these additional costs.

That's great feedback. I'll relay that to the product team. IANAL, but I think it would be legally challenging.

Opt-in for the SLA and additional cluster cost would be fantastic. We run pretty small clusters but don't need any additional SLA's on top of what's already provided. Frankly we could care less about the control plane SLA.

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

#226

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 manag…

> They probably don't pay you enough.

Can confirm :)

> ...we do already pay for resources that are provisioned by our K8S clusters

Customers are charged for worker nodes, but until this point, the control plane ("master") nodes have been free. In addition to the raw compute costs for those nodes, there's the SRE overhead for managing, upgrading, and securing them.

> ...but I generally assumed that that cost was amortized out

I'm not really sure. My guess would be that, initially, this was the case. However, over time, people have created many zero-node clusters. Now the amortization isn't. Again, pure speculation.

> But, isn't that quotas are for?

See my comment above about zero-node clusters.

> 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...

Acknowledge, but I do want to highlight that changes take place a few months from now (June 2020), not immediately. Furthermore, each billing account gets one zonal cluster with no management fee.

> 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?

100% no. Also, Cloud Run is almost always cheaper than running a Kubernetes cluster.

> Are we about to get Oracled?

I'm not sure what you mean by that verb.

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

#227
post #200

After this, I've been exploring other places to host our team's clusters... copied pricing below - EKS: $0.10/hour/cluster - Digital Ocean: Free (only charges for the nodes) - Azure: Free (only charges for the nodes) In the long run we'll probably try and build our stack on vendor-agnostic tools.. - Rancher - https://rancher.com/products/rancher/ - Infra.app - https://infra.app (mentioned a few weeks back on the Kube…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22487110

Honestly I understand the hard work it takes to manage all the clusters, but this was a total bait and switch and hurts the reputation that everyone has with Google Cloud. Telling us to DIY because we cannot pay $71 just sounds like someone who works at Google would say, which you do work at Google.

The sentiment with my clients before was that Google Cloud was a great choice because of the security and expertise with GKE. It's also free!

Meanwhile, in the back of my head I've always had this fear because of your reputation that you do not keep your promises and that you do not care about your users. Because of this fear, we have tried to make every infrastructure decision not use a managed service by Google even though it may be easier to do so short-term.

For the product I'm working on, we decided to use Kubernetes just in case you baited and switched us with the reputation you have. In terms of monitoring, we really wanted to use Stackdriver, but now we're 100% using fluent-bit + prometheus + loki + grafana. It's the only way to protect ourselves from your reputation which is becoming a reality.

So yeah, this is pretty sad and a bad decision. Should have priced GKE at $70 / month to begin with and we would have been fine with it. Now we're (actually) looking at EKS since Amazon doesn't seem to have this reputation and you've spooked us. We never would have thought about using any other provider until today.

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

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the main value of GKE over DIY is $73, you should totally DIY. I mostly try not to be too Google-focused here, but I have to say... I'm pretty proud of GKE, and I think it offers a lot of value other than just being cheap. Managing clusters is not always easy. GKE handles all of that for you - including integrations, qualifications, upgrades, and patching clusters transparently BEFORE public security disclosures h…

>If the main value of GKE over DIY is $73, you should totally DIY. It's not the fee itself, it's the worry that GKE will do what Google Maps did and massively increase fees with very little notice, causing people to scramble to migrate. Google has a really bad reputation right now when it comes to cancelling projects that people have built their businesses upon, or jacking up fees quickly. The $73 is irrelevant on it…

Google and Google Cloud are largely different businesses, though I understand it's hard to keep that in mind in the context of things like this.

I encourage everyone to always stay nimble and keep your eyes on portability. I also encourage you to try to assess the REAL costs of doing things yourself. It's rarely as cheap as you think it is.

As a Kubernetes maintainer, I am fanatical about portability.

As part of the GKE team, I think we provide tremendous value that people tend to under-estimate.

NOTE: I was NOT involved in this decision, but I understand it, and I want to help other people understand it.

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

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

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/cloudrun and get the same availability (by this I mean multiple zones) 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. I'd be very happy to see you include at least a single multi-zone cluster control plane in the free tier.

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