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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

#381

Post by rexreed »

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…

Can someone explain to me the cattle vs. pets analogy? I'm not sure I get it.

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

#382

Post by atombender »

tie_ wrote: post #378
atombender wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Would never happen. Just the amount of time needed to dedicate to onboarding a temporary contractor would be really disruptive to the developers, not to mention the disruptive effect of the technical migration — databases to move over, persistent volumes to copy, DNS to repoint, lots of downtime, etc. There's a good reason companies don't switch clouds often.

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

#383

Post by bartread »

txomon wrote: post #37
sethvargo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the feedback. > Google's inability to actually commit to long term support... This is _exactly_ what Google is doing in this case. We are providing an SLA - a legal agreement of availability and support. These changes introduce a guaranteed availability of the management control plane.

He means that there was a sales pitch from all gcp sales guys to not charge for that. 99.95% is not enough IMO to charge 73$/mo. As someone else noted, it breaks a lot of recommended architectures where you would have auto provisioning and a lot of clusters to separate concerns and keep costs down. Finally, the pricing changes are starting to look like a pattern, every time Google deems the usage of a product is good…

> Finally, the pricing changes are starting to look like a pattern, every time Google deems the usage of a product is good enough, they will increase the price.

To be fair this is hardly new and by no means limited to Google. Any number of SaaS startups that have survived to at least moderate success have done similar things.

Look at UserVoice as an example: started out with a free tier plus some reasonable paid tiers with transparent pricing, then a year or two back killed the free tier and moved to a non-transparent "enterprise" pricing model with absolutely exhorbitant fees.

Plenty of other companies offer free to build their userbase and reach, then either water down the free tier, or remove it entirely. It's practically the SV modus operandi for the last decade.

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

#384

Post by caleblloyd »

I think that CRDs are partially to blame for this. CRDs can tax the API Server and backing data store, without directly mapping to a revenue-generating activity.

I’ve noticed a trend where teams spin up new clusters for each application. Since CRDs are installed on the cluster level, it is not possible to namespace resource versions. It is easier for teams to take the cluster-per-application approach as opposed to mandating a specific version of cluster tooling.

More small clusters means more control planes, and more subsidizing if a cloud provider is giving away the control plane.

I just finished a blog post on this opinion that goes into more detail- https://caleblloyd.com/software/crds-killed-free-kubernetes-...

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

#385

Post by yoshiat »

andybak wrote: post #365
yoshiat wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your feedback and we understand this was a surprise to you and many. For cluster per customer architecture, would you be able to look into https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/best-practic... to see if there is anything useful? We understand changing the architecture isn't easy at all and we'd love to know how we can help.

I'm curious whether you're comfortable with this move or not. Something about your tone gives the impression you think this was a strategic error.

thockingoog's responses below articulates my feeling very well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22487726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22487110

What I can do is to lower the bar for aggregating clusters with the investments we've done so far. Hope that makes sense.

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

#386

Post by tmpz22 »

zomglings wrote: post #318
lvh wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> As this project is pre-1.0, we do not currently offer strong guarantees around our API stability.

Notably, we may choose to make breaking changes to our API specification (i.e. the Issuer, ClusterIssuer and Certificate resources) in new minor releases.

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

#387

Post by profmonocle »

defen wrote: post #357
sethvargo wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They probably don't pay you enough. Can confirm :) > ...we do already pay for resources that are provisioned by our K8S clusters Customers are charged for worker nodes, but until this point, the control plane ("master") nodes have been free. In addition to the raw compute costs for those nodes, there's the SRE overhead for managing, upgrading, and securing them. > ...but I generally assumed that that cost was amort…

>> Are we about to get Oracled? > I'm not sure what you mean by that verb. The CEO of Google Cloud is the former President of Product Development at Oracle Corporation. Oracle Corporation has a reputation for being incredibly hostile to their customers, which includes things like "finding creative new ways to charge our customers more money. I mean, what are they going to do, switch to Postgres? lol" I think the fund…

> finding creative new ways to charge our customers more money.

This is what I'm worried about, because it's the second time this year that GCP started charging for something that was previously included. Back in January they started charging $2.92 per month for in-use IP addresses.

The IP charge might be justifiable because of IPv4 scarcity (although their major competitors still include IPs), but with today's announcement coming just a couple months later, I'm worried they're going to start nickel-and-diming us. I'll be skeptical of any new GCP services that are advertised as having no extra cost.

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

#388

Post by yongjik »

slovenlyrobot wrote: post #354
yongjik wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mo…

The most common thing I've heard is "blast radius reduction", i.e. the general public are not yet smart enough to run large shared infrastructures. That seems something that should be obviously true. People had exactly the same experiences with Mesos and OpenStack, but k8s has decent tooling for turning up many clusters, so there is an easy workaround

I still feel like that would only work in very niche cases.

I mean, if people aren't smart enough to run a large shared infrastructure, how can I trust them to run a large number of shared clusters, even if each cluster is small. The final scale is still the same.

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

#389

Post by fosk »

bluhbi wrote: post #273
endymi0n wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.go…

> you loose all the self healing stuff and loadbalancing capability.

I mean, yes? You can either build your own for “free”, or pay for the value-add features DO provides that you have described. I don’t see where the problem is.

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

#390

Post by blazespin »

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…

For any real production system you have to use terraform and their ilk to manage clusters, as you need to be spinning up and down dev/qa/prod clusters.

I don't know GCP though. In the past I've seen kube cluster archs which are very very fragile as they spin up. If that's the case with GCP I can see why you wouldn't do the above and rather hand hold their creation.

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