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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

#251

Time to start looking into DigitalOcean more seriously. G Cloud is already unreasonably expensive and nearly impossible to price manage. It's cool to see them double-down on that.

Look at Vultr too. My last 2 support tickets were responded to within 2 minutes and solved within 10 minutes. Their support has always been good, but unlike almost all other companies, it seems to get better as they grow.

I run a Kubernetes cluster on Vultr and I haven't had any problems.

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

#252
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.)

As also a security person (:wave:), you can use dedicated node pools and workload identity to isolate workloads in the same cluster.

Workload identity is a GCP-specific beta feature for mapping to GCP IAM, right?

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

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Would your team consider tweaking the pricing as I mentioned, with the goal of helping early stage startups choose GCP? To be clear, it's not my team. I'm relaying feedback, but I can't make any guarantees or promises. All this feedback is super valid and important, and it's being synthesized to the product team.

I appreciate that. Thanks for being available on hackernews and helping relay feedback.

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

#254
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

I understand the emotional response here, but I don't think it's rational. GKE has to work as a business, or else the whole thing is in trouble. I think GKE provides tons of value, but people tend to under-estmate that. In order to keep providing that value, we need to make sure it is sustainable. I'm really, truly sad that you perceive it as bait-and-switch, but I disagree with that characterization. If you want to…

I think part of the optic's issues is your peers seem to be offering similar services for free, while being sustainable.

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

#255

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…

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…

I believe everything that you say. The value it provides is very good.

If Google Cloud would have charged 73$ from the start (or after beta), i think there wouldn't be so much anger.

The anger comes from, a product was free and now it is not. A lot of people made architectural choices that depended on the price of 0. (You mentioned these cases in your post).

However, i believe the bigger issue is, that Google Cloud broke essentially a promise.

As a customer I need to be able to trust my cloud provider, because I am literally helpless without it.

Can I trust an entity that breaks promises ? No, I can't. I need to worry. Especially, if I cannot follow the reasoning behind it.

If it is true, that Google's overhead went up, because of improvements, then it would have better to have two kinds of clusters (better and paid, old-school and free). You would have not broken the promise. People can choose on their own pace to upgrade if they need to.

Also keep in mind, that you also carry the Google brand. Hence, if other teams of Google break promises (like f.e. Stadia) this will also reflect on the Google Cloud team. Unless you keep a crystal clear track record, i need to assume it can get worse than what you have done right now.

My conclusion is that, I will design the cloud architecture I am responsible for, such that it has minimal dependencies on Google Cloud specifics.

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

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 amort…

Thank you for the detailed response. > In addition to the raw compute costs for those nodes, there's the SRE overhead for managing, upgrading, and securing them. By that logic, can we expect to see charges for GCP Projects and the GCP Console? Cloud IAM? > people have created many zero-node clusters I'd be really curious what is driving folks to do that. Are they using the backplane for CRDs and custom controllers an…

If abuse of zero-node clusters is an issue, wouldn't it be better to introduce a zero-node cluster fee the same way you charge for unused reserved IP addresses?

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

#257

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 .

Hi Seth - I am a LONG time lurker here on HN, but this news just forced me to create an account. I am part of a small company which has separated our deployment into a number of sub projects, some of which are: dev, staging, production, ci, etc. The difference for us will be several hundred dollars per month, and that will make an actual (negative) difference for us. We didn't need a "financially backed SLA" before a…

Thank you for the feedback. I'll relay this to the product team. I feel your frustration and, unfortunately, I do not have much to offer beyond my promise to relay this feedback and the items I've expressed in other responses.

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

#258
post #117
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 72$ not 300 and the first is free. I'm not sure what your usecase is that you would choose gke and you are worried about 300$ per month infra costs. For Corp we use gke. For private I use selfhostet k3samd for our startup asuper cheap digital ocean cluster.

> worried about 300$ per month infra costs That feels like the wrong attitude.

The salary of people working and using those 'tools' this infrastructure is higher then 300$.

If your kubernetes cluster is part of your core infrastructure, then 300$ more or less should not be an issue at all (not to say that i think 300$ is nothing).

That should not mean that you should waste money but often enough, if you buy cheap and your hardware breaks and your time&material costs much more then what a better hardware would have cost, then you wasted money by buying cheap.

Unfortunate with IT products, there are certain things which are not directly visible: Like how secure is your product. GCP offers 2FA, Digital Ocean does not. How much money is it worth to you to have your whole infrastructure protected by 2FA? For me in a business context, non 2FA would be a no go.

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

#259
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As also a security person (:wave:), you can use dedicated node pools and workload identity to isolate workloads in the same cluster.

Workload identity is a GCP-specific beta feature for mapping to GCP IAM, right?

yes

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

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 amort…

Thank you for the detailed response. > In addition to the raw compute costs for those nodes, there's the SRE overhead for managing, upgrading, and securing them. By that logic, can we expect to see charges for GCP Projects and the GCP Console? Cloud IAM? > people have created many zero-node clusters I'd be really curious what is driving folks to do that. Are they using the backplane for CRDs and custom controllers an…

> I'd be really curious what is driving folks to do that.

I was one of those people. I got an email from Google this morning and thought "that's weird. I didn't even know I was running a Kubernetes cluster." I think I created it years ago to work through a Kubernetes tutorial and, since it was free, never bothered to delete it.

So, I can imagine this being a problem. Though it seems like having a minimum hourly charge per cluster would have been a better way to handle this (i.e. if your cluster is using less than $0.10/hr in resources, you get charged the difference).

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