Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cloud.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 633 posts

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

#371

Post by atombender »

briangrant wrote: post #359
atombender wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Re. managing GCP as Kubernetes resources: https://cloud.google.com/config-connector/docs/overview

That's very cool, thanks! Note that this allows selectively creating Kubernetes resources backed by GCP resources. Looks like it will not automatically sync everything that already exists, which seems like a missed opportunity.

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

#372

Post by andybak »

alasdair_ wrote: post #188
lilbobbytables wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the docs linked from the email are not updated yet. That about sums up most things Google does for developers.

I thought the standard advice for Google stuff was "there are always two systems - the undocumented one, and the deprecated one"

That's a wonderful quote that applies to many companies. (I think that will resonate with the Unity developer community right now.)

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

#373

Post by marvinblum »

dindresto wrote: post #312
marvinblum wrote: post #116

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?

kubeadm

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

#376

Post by vpEfljFL »

ratherbefuddled wrote: post #248

I don't like the direction this is heading, it seems like the SLA and the accompanying charge could easily have been optional. We have a couple of dozen clusters, two per client, and can't change the architecture. We use helm and terraform and can build new clusters quickly but we can't treat them entirely like cattle because we don't own all the DNS. Our clients are not the sort to do things quickly - or even slowly…

As many have mentioned here already, $72/mo most likely a rounding error on workloads kubernetes is designed for.

I think, most customers love the change because of SLA where even 1 minute of downtime per year is amplitude more costly than 10 years of cluster managing fee.

This also showing the commitment from google to provide great and reliable service.

If you're looking to run k8s "for free", Digital Ocean looks like the way to go, but again, it's two completely different set of offerings and if you've chosen the google cloud in the first place then DO doesn't look like suitable alternative.

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

#377

Post by hughpeters »

thockingoog wrote: post #341
hughpeters wrote: post #328

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.

Free (zonal) cluster per account, regardless of size, should cover a lot of this, no?

Great point! Didn't catch that one. I'll edit my comment

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

#378

Post by tie_ »

atombender wrote: post #347
praveenperera wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But DigitalOcean has managed K8s now: https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/

DigitalOcean did not have Kubernetes then. Are you suggesting we should spend 6-12 man months migrating back?

How about contracting an ops-oriented person for a month that would do the migration for you? Where do those cost functions intersect?

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

#379

Post by batter »

atombender wrote: post #300
rcconf wrote: post #197

Oh wow, one of the biggest reasons we picked Google Cloud was that you did not have to pay a flat fee for their managed Kubernetes service. Luckily there is Kubernetes support across all Cloud Providers so we're happy we're not vendor locked in. (biggest reason we picked Kubernetes in the first place.) We were thinking of using Stackdriver for logging, but we were scared of vendor locked in due to price increases or…

Stackdriver is terrible, and super expensive for what it is. We ran a dedicated Fluentd in GKE for a long time to work around its shortcomings (GKE also uses/used Fluentd to shuffle logs into Stackdriver), then switched to using Loki + Promtail + Grafana, which has been excellent.

Stackdriver indeed horrible

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

#380

Post by solidasparagus »

thockingoog wrote: post #236
rcconf wrote: 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…

This kind of mentality is why Google is struggling. You forget that your customers are human and make emotion-driven decisions. This price increase proves that you are not making sustainable long-term decision and you are willing to dump the cost of that mistake on your customers.

We already don't trust Google to provide long-term, stable, reliable infrastructure and each time something like this happens, we become more convinced that Google isn't trustworthy.

Post reply on HN