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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

#321

Post by skboosh »

geerlingguy wrote: post #182
sethvargo wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> clusters should be treated like cattle, not pets Heh... how many teams actually treat their clusters like cattle, though? Every time I advocate automation around cluster management, people start complaining that "you don't have to do that anymore, we have Kubernetes!" Some people get it, yes, but even of that group, few have the political will/strength to make sure that automation is set up on the cluster level—esp…

> clusters should be treated like cattle, not pets

Sugarkube is designed to do exactly that.

[1] https://docs.sugarkube.io

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

#322

Post by yongjik »

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…

> clusters should be treated like cattle, not pets.

Off-topic, but is this really how people do k8s these days? Years ago when I was at Google, each physical datacenter had at most several "clusters", which would have fifty thousand cores and run every job from every team. A single k8s cluster is already a task management system (with a lot of complexity), so what do people gain by having many clusters, other than more complexity?

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

#323

Post by stas2k »

freedomben wrote: post #168
pojzon wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about managing own k8s running on VMs / bare-metal? Pretty much anyone who works in ops longer understood from the go that its impossible to be totally provider-agnostic. K8S is just a nice api on top of provider api that still requires provider specific configuration.

Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat and am very biased, but this is my own honest opinion. If you're going to run on bare-metal or in your own VMs, OpenShift is very much worth a look. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of ways to shoot yourself in the foot, and OpenShift puts up guard rails for you (which you can bypass if you want to). OpenShift 4 runs on top of RHCOS which makes node management much simpler, and allow…

Don't want to sound snarky, but how about an upgrade path from 3.11 to 4.x? I am a heavy Openshift user and it seems that RH just dumped whatever architecture they had with pre-4 clusters and switched to a Tectonic-like 4.x installations without any way to upgrade other than a new installation. This makes it hard to migrate with physical nodes.

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

#324

Post by nfg »

pojzon wrote: post #112
bloblaw wrote: 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...

Azure AKS is pretty terrible TBH in comparison to GKE. Also lack of SLA / shady SLA does not help. Ps. Talking as someone with hands on experience. Ps2. Azure support is terrible and their response times are constantly breaking SLA..

I’m keen to hear what problems you’ve had with AKS if you’ve got time to share them here.

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

#325

Post by zomglings »

briffle wrote: post #316
sneak wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

Perhaps the right thing for GKE to do is introduce a cluster snapshot. Sounds like a great feature.

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

#326

Post by Spooky23 »

bloblaw wrote: post #74
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…

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...

I don't have a horse in the race, but I work with Gartner alot, and would encourage you to actually read their guidance carefully and read about the Magic Quadrant methodology carefully. Gartner analysts go through the features and functions very closely, but the magic quadrant ratings are heavily weighted by Gartner customer and other peer feedback.

The magic quadrant isn't a good housekeeping seal of approval. It's a screener for an architect in Fortune 500 or .Gov to show social proof that their product selection isn't insane.

The "cautions" for GCP are about the nascent state of their field sales and solution architects, enterprise relationship management, and limited partner community.

The "cautions" for Azure are poor reliability, poor support, and sticker shock.

My takeaway was very different from yours. When you read the analysis, it was reflective of a mature, dominant player (AWS) and two highly capable challengers with different issues.

Google is a newer business that is missing some services (ie. anything user facing) and is transitioning from a weird sales model to a more conventional enterprise one. Microsoft has an established business process and best in class sales org, but they tend to use sticks of various types to force adoption and are organizationally poorly equipped to support customers.

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

#327

Post by atombender »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #317
atombender wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 infrastruct…

Less than 15 employees. Several products, two teams, We migrated our stuff from DigitalOcean around 2018. At the time, we briefly toyed with the notion of self-hosting Kubernetes on DO, but it's complex to manage, and we don't have any dedicated ops staff. GKE is significantly easier to manage.

At that time we migrated, the things you mentioned weren't available/mature, I think. Even today, I'd choose Kubernetes over a complex mishmash of different systems. I like the unified, extensible ops model. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I wish all of GCP could be managed as Kubernetes objects.

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

#328

Post by hughpeters »

This makes GKE pretty much impossible to use for side projects. Given that it will cost $100 per cluster per month without including the instance costs.

Edit: A single zonal cluster per GCP account is exempt from this fee, so this comment is inaccurate.

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

#330

Post by GKE_Greed »

sethvargo wrote: post #96
kwils wrote: post #35

Note: Azure does not charge a master/cluster management fee (bias disclosure I work for Microsoft)

Attempting to capitalize on a competitor's announcement isn't cool and doesn't look great.

Its actually appreciated. When a vendor makes a change to screw customers, those customers like me appreciate hearing from the vendor's competitors.
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