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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

#271

Post by thockingoog »

dcolkitt wrote: post #266
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.

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…

Those empty clusters that you get for free cost Google money. Perhaps it never should have been free, because that skewed incentives towards models like this.

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

#272

Post by gowld »

sethvargo wrote: post #129
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…

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…

> I'm sorry that you feel trapped, that's not our intention.

Please don't do this. You can apologize for your actions work to improve in the future , but you cannot apologize for how someone feels as a result of your actions.

Also, intent doesn't matter unless you plan to change your behavior to undo or mitigate the unintended result.

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

#273

Post by bluhbi »

endymi0n wrote: post #123
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…

Interesting. As a mid level GCP customer, it won't make a big dent on our bill specifically, but in the end, I'm not sure this pricing move is a smart strategy. With this fixed fee model, the change will barely make a difference (== Google revenue) for the large customers who can spare the money, but will create a significant entry barrier to that side project / super-early stage that considers getting hooked on GCP,…

Thats for me the most frustrating thing with GCP, AWS and Azure. I would never use them as a very early small 3 people startup or for private reasons.

There is no billing protection (which could make you very poor very fast) and every service has a certain cost and quality which is just not feasable in the beginning.

Even GKE with its free kubernetes master does block a lot of resources on the nodes: https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/clu...

Also a ton of great features on gke you will probably never use if you are too small. It is so much cheaper to just get cheap hardware somewhere and put your own k8s onto it if you have more time then money.

Even on Digital Ocean you have the load balancer problem: you need to use the provided and also 'costly' LoadBalancer service. There is only one hacky way to prevent it by exposing your ingress on the host and mapping that one ip but then you loose all the self healing stuff and loadbalancing capability.

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

#274

Post by gowld »

sethvargo wrote: post #180
outworlder wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Workers are not free and never were. So they were already charging.

Correct, but the control plane nodes _were_ free and had no SLA. This changes that. [edit: spelling]

_were_ free. (Emphasis yours.)

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

#275

Post by erulabs »

cmhnn wrote: post #223
the_duke wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 miff…

Welcome to HN - this is not reddit - please take a look at the comment rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#276

Post by thockingoog »

zzzcpan wrote: post #234
thockingoog wrote: post #206

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…

> As a Kubernetes maintainer, I WANT to say that a smaller number of larger clusters is generally a better answer. I'm not trying to nitpick here, but that justification is awful. It goes against reliability engineering on a deeply fundamental level, pretty much guarantees to make already not that reliable things even less reliable. Generally the more isolated entities you have and the smaller they are the less they…

That is not absolute truth. If it were you would eschew kubernetes altogether and just use VMs.

Everything is a tradeoff. If you want total isolation, you pay for it. If you don't want to pay for it, you make more value-based tradeoffs.

Concretely, Google runs "a handful" of "pretty reliable" services on a relatively small number of clusters.

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

#277

Post by thockingoog »

ohyeshedid wrote: post #254
thockingoog wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

EKS has always had a fee.

AKS, well, I don't have any insight into their business, but I have my suspicions.

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

#278

Post by thockingoog »

mleonard wrote: post #263
thockingoog wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

This is a fair point. We don't have an HA (multi-master) zonal offering either, because mostly people don't want that.

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

#279

Post by jwegner »

There actually was a 15/cent/hr fee a few years back:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2017/11/29/google-...

YMMV, but I think the value prop of using a managed GKE cluster vs the raw costs and engineering time to run your own control plane is still strong.

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

#280

Post by thockingoog »

tamale wrote: post #264
thockingoog wrote: post #54

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.

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 cluste…

Try KIND. Much better devex.
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