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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

#391

Post by [deleted] »

atombender wrote: post #327
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#393

Post by tie_ »

atombender wrote: post #382
tie_ wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it takes more than a month to migrate a 20-node K8s cluster, then that's a red flag. Too much tech debt or a strong vendor lock-in? Either deserves attention.

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

#394

Post by blazespin »

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…

Likely this model is precisely why they are introducing this fee.

I guess they realized they couldn't make cluster management MT.

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

#395

Post by dashwav »

rexreed wrote: post #381
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…

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

https://devops.stackexchange.com/questions/653/what-is-the-d...

This is a pretty good in depth explanation, but at a high level if a your server dies and you are extremely upset about it (similar to if your pet died) you are putting too many eggs in that single basket, with no secondary plan. Conversely if you build your infra in such a way that your server dying is something you see no worse than how a farmer sees one of his cattle dying (which are raised to be killed) - you are much better prepared for the inevitable downtime from your server and can very easily recover

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

#396

Post by bearjaws »

praveenperera wrote: post #342

Good time for people to look into DigitalOcean managed Kubernetes (DOKS). I've been using it since it was in pre-release and its been great so far. Their support has been very responsive as well. https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/

I am using this as well for two smaller projects, it has been amazing. I tied it with Gitlab autodevops in about 30 minutes, most of which was dealing with migrating to DO managed Postgres.

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

#397

Post by blazespin »

zomglings wrote: post #314
dcolkitt wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, this is the general approach. However it unfortunately has security implications as you are putting MT workloads on a pool with access back to a shared control plane. Dealing with customer uploaded code is a nightmare.

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

#398

Post by rudolph9 »

I wish there was a "Preemptible" or more cost effective tier for GKE. I get why they're doing this and $70/month seems reasonable for a premium service but would be nice to have a more cost effective option similar with tradeoffs similar to "Preemptible" nodes.

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

#399

Post by blazespin »

lvh wrote: post #100
xur17 wrote: 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..

This highlights a sorta-weird consequence of this pricing change: suddenly pricing incentivizes you to use namespacing instead of clusters for separating environments. (As a security person: ugh.)

Or move to minikube and friends. If it's a dev environment you can usually get away with such things.

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

#400

Post by giovannibonetti »

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…

Indeed, for small apps that average 2 instances or less during the month it's now cheaper to run App Engine Flex than GKE. Each instance costs about US$ 50/month in US central.

For those that are not aware, App Engine Flex runs services based on Docker containers with autoscaling similarly to Kubernetes. It has way less features than GKE, but if you are just running a standard app that only needs to connect to a database that is more than enough.

Bonus points: you can have multiple services, like back-end and front-end and make them available in the same subdomain - to avoid CORS problems. You can also host your front-end for almost nothing with App Engine Standard. It has an awesome CDN built-in if you know how to use it.

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