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

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

#261

Post by sethvargo »

awslattery wrote: post #153
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 taking to the comments here; sad I wouldn't be able to catch one of your talks at Next this year in-person. I'd like to share some feedback that echoes that of other commentators, from a different perspective. I run a local cloud developer community with regional pull for attendees, as well as working directly with local early-stage startups looking to become cloud-native. GCP has always been my…

This feedback is super valuable - thank you for sharing. I'll be sure to relay it to the product team.

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

#262

Post by bluhbi »

xur17 wrote: post #93
sethvargo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the feedback. The management fee is per cluster. You are not billed for replicated control planes. You can use the pricing calculator at https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator#tab=container to model pricing, but it should work out to $73/mo regardless of nodes or cluster size (again, because it's charged per-cluster). There's also one completely free zonal cluster for hobbyist projects.

We currently spin up dev clusters with a single node. $73/mo is going to basically double the cost of all of these..

Its still billed by the minute. If you run your dev clusters all the time 24x7 then they apparently are critical enough.

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

#263

Post by mleonard »

thockingoog wrote: post #52
sladey wrote: post #6

This is really disappointing. GKE was a staple amongst Kubernetes adoption, not only for the feature-set but also that there were no overhead costs. I hope GCP re-thinks this.

For folks just trying it out, 1 cluster is still free.

For folks just trying it out, 1 cluster is still free... in a single physical data centre. Sadly you'll be charged for running a cluster across two or three data centres in the same availability zone (eg London).

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

#264

Post by tamale »

thockingoog wrote: post #54
stevencorona wrote: post #5

Wow, this is a huge bummer. A lot of our infrastructure assumptions have been based around having several small GKE clusters.

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.

Our cloud service here at confluent is designed around giving customers their own infrastructure. A lot of the times, that means giving them their own k8s cluster. The management overhead there isn't the issue however.

The real issue comes into play when you try to make developer environments.

To give our developers any semblance of a "real production-like" workload, they need to work with an entire kubernetes cluster - maybe even a couple - to simulate what's happening in production.

This means at any given time, we have hundreds of GKE clusters because each developer needs a place to try things. Yes, these are ephemeral and can be tossed aside, and yes they cost a tiny bit in VM prices, but adding a per-cluster management fee is going to skyrocket this expense and push us towards trying to figure out ways to share these clusters between developers, which defeats the entire purpose of the project.

We'll have to seriously consider abandoning GKE for this use-case now and that sucks, because it's by far the fastest managed k8s solution we've found so far.

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

#265

Post by bluhbi »

rolleiflex wrote: post #106
lvh wrote: 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…

What? Shouldn't you try to make the creation and deletion of your staging cluster cheap instead of moving it to somewhere else?

And if that is your central infrastructure, shouldn't it be worth the money?

I do get the issue with having cheap and beefy hardware somewhere else, i do that as well, but only for private. My hourly salary spending or wasting time on stuff like that costs the company more than just paying for an additional cluster with the same settings but perhaps with much less Nodes.

If more than one person is using it, the multiplication effects for suddenly unproductive people, is much higher. Also that decreases the per head cost.

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

#266

Post by dcolkitt »

sethvargo wrote: post #80
rolleiflex wrote: post #58

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…

Thank you for the feedback. The management fee is per cluster. You are not billed for replicated control planes. You can use the pricing calculator at https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator#tab=container to model pricing, but it should work out to $73/mo regardless of nodes or cluster size (again, because it's charged per-cluster). There's also one completely free zonal cluster for hobbyist projects.

Hi Seth,

What about clusters that are used for lumpy work loads? Like data science pipelines? For example, our org has a few dozen clusters being used like that.

Each pipeline gets its own cluster instance as a way to enforce rough and ready isolation. Most of the times the clusters sit unused. To keep them alive we keep a small, cheap, preemptive node alive on the idle cluster. When a new batch of data comes in, we fire up kube jobs which then triggers GKE autoscaling that processes the workload.

This pricing change means we're looking at thousands of dollar more in billing per month. Without any tangible improvement in service. (The keepalive node hack only costs $5 a month per cluster.) We could consolidate the segmented cluster instances into a single cluster with separate namespaces, but that would also cost thousands in valuable developer time.

I don't know how common our use pattern is, but I think we would be a lot better served by a discounted management fee when the cluster is just being kept alive and not actually using any resources. At $0.01, maybe even $0.02, per hour we could justify it. But paying $0.10 to keep empty clusters alive is just egregious.

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

#267

Post by mleonard »

tssva wrote: post #30
d_watt wrote: post #14

$72/month per cluster, regardless of the size. It's interesting they're not charging per managed node (outside of the regular machine cost), makes it steep if you want to have a small cluster up.

Each billing account gets 1 free zonal cluster so the cost for keeping a small cluster up won't change.

Currently I have a small cluster with 3 nodes running, each in a different zone (data centres next to each other, eg in London). Sadly this will now be charged.

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

#268

Post by erulabs »

agoell wrote: 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…

One more shameless plug for my startup, https://kubesail.com (YCS19)!

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

#270

Post by olafure »

ones_and_zeros wrote: post #175
rolleiflex wrote: post #90

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…

I agree the rollout is a little bumpy but I'm curious what workloads you are using k8s for where a $74/mo (or $300/mo) bill isn't a rounding error in your capex?

$3600/year is significant for a startup on a shoestring budget.
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