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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

#311
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Generally curious, isn’t Docker Kubernetes an option?

It is - especially on OSX, it is very cpu and memory intensive thought.

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

#312

We moved our cluster into the Hetzner Cloud for Emvi [1]. Yes, they don't offer a managed solution and it took us about two weeks to set up and test the cluster properly. But the cost is less than 1/6 of what gcloud costs us. If you have the resources and knowledge to maintain your own cluster, check it out. They have insanely good pricing (2,96 €/month for the cheapest instance which is faster than Googles $15/month…

Do you use any special solution like Rancher or kubeadm?

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

#313

We're a little bit too locked to GCP to migrate out.... But I'll definitely stop evangelizing GCP to people. I have now lost faith in you, GCP.

same here - losing face now with my team when I argued for GCP (and won) against AWS.

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

#314

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…

On GKE, you can use a single cluster with multiple node pools to achieve a similar effect. Just set the right affinity on your job resources.

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

#315

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…

Shouldn't the investment in Kubernetes bring its running cost down instead of increasing it?

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

#316
post #299
post #295

I know the HN crowd hates this sort of thing, but seems reasonable to me. $70/month is a very reasonable price, and most businesses likely have well under 10 clusters (I’d think many just have 2-3, a single cluster for prod and then 1-2 dev/test type environments). This is probably mostly to cut down on edge cases users who are spinning up crazy numbers of clusters for weird reasons, and costing Google a bunch of $$$…

Furthermore, anyone spending enough on compute to warrant k8s shouldn’t balk at all at $70/mo. I think the threshold for introducing the complexity and overhead of k8s isn’t probably until at least $5-10k/mo of spend (and probably 3-10x that in the normal case). Less than that and k8s is a whole lot of overkill.

We use google cloud projects to isolate customers and environments. (Some of our clients are old school and VERY scared of cloud, and multi-tenant). so for our pretty small company, we have >60 projects, each with a k8s cluster. that is a pretty good bump in costs come this summer.

Historically, we have powered down all the compute in a project that isn't needed, but left the k8s cluster in place (with its compute nodes powered down) because we could then bring it back up in 2 min or less. That dropped our cost for each project that was powered down to ~$25-$50/month, depending on how much disk space, etc, they were using. this will more than double (or triple) the cost of those projects. If we have to rebuild a full cluster from scratch, we then have to wait for the global load balancer to build our ingress, and then go authorize a TLS cert. This adds 20-30 min to re-activating our projects, which will suck.

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

#317

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…

Just a data point: I'm the CTO at a very small company. All our stuff is running on GKE. Our monthly bill tends is a lot less than $10,000/mo. We're currently in the process of splitting our stack into separate projects and clusters, because co-locating projects in a single cluster has gotten messy. We'll probably end up with 4-5. That will increase our bill by $292/mo, worst case, assuming the first cluster is free.…

Not sure what size a "very small company" size is, but I'm just curious as to why you chose GKE. I make tech decisions for a (probably) much smaller company, and I found things like App Engine Flexible Environment, Cloud Run and Cloud Functions let me do much of the stuff I can do with k8s but with much, much less complexity (at least on my side of things). The main factor is that I don't have a full-time infrastructure expert, and my experience in the past is that k8s essentially requires that.

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

#318
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re in the same situation — we’ve engineered for minimum provider-specific dependencies but GKE LoadBalancers were where they got us via arm twisting as well. There is no way to expose a cluster to the outside world in a production environment otherwise.

It's kind of ridiculous internal load balancers can't get automatic certs. We've had to do a stupid dance just to get certs via the LE DNS challenge out of band, and then regularly install them on internal LBs.

Does cert-manager not for your needs?

https://github.com/jetstack/cert-manager

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

#319

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…

> but clusters should be treated like cattle, not pets

Ha. They should, but they are absolutely not. Customers typically ask "why should we spend time on automating cluster deployment when we are going to do it just once?" and when I explain that it's for when the cluster goes away, if it goes away, they say it's an acceptable risk.

The truth of the matter is, even in some huge international companies, they don't have the resources to keep up with development of tools to have completely phoenix servers. They just want to write automation and have it work for the next 10 years, and that's definitely not the case.

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

#320
post #81
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GCP is actually more the 3rd inferior option, behind Azure. Gartner lists Azure as just behind AWS for IaaS providers, and GCP a more distant 3rd: https://pages.awscloud.com/Gartner-Magic-Quadrant-for-Infras...

Gcp is not gke. In my opinion the gke offering fromg gcp is the best right now.

I agree. Though I will say that IAP and gsuite groups backed IAM is nice.
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