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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

#401

Post by randomdude402 »

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.

"In the old way of doing things, we treat our servers like pets, for example Bob the mail server. If Bob goes down, it’s all hands on deck. The CEO can’t get his email and it’s the end of the world. In the new way, servers are numbered, like cattle in a herd. For example, www001 to www100. When one server goes down, it’s taken out back, shot, and replaced on the line."

http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/the-history-of-...

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

#402

Post by yebyen »

thockingoog wrote: post #271
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…

Those empty clusters that you get for free cost Google money. Perhaps it never should have been free, because that skewed incentives towards models like this.

Google are (were) not the only ones offering this free control plane model, though. My DigitalOcean DOk8s managed tend toward unstable if they are used with too small of node pools. (I don't know why that is, but it seems like a good way to make sure I pay attention to the workloads and also spend at least $20/mo for each cluster I run with them.)

It will be interesting in any case to see if DigitalOcean and Azure are going to follow suit! I'd be very surprised if they do, (but I've also been wrong before, recently too.)

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

#403

Post by yoshiat »

lokar wrote: post #152
lvh wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

You can dedicated nodes by namespace, at which point the isolation is pretty strong.

Nit: we don't recommend dedicated nodes for isolation. PTAL at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rMGRvcjvKc And the guidance from GKE is at https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/best-practic...

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

#404

Post by ratherbefuddled »

vpEfljFL wrote: post #376
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 l…

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

There are _many_ reasons to use k8 beyond just workload scale and that amount per cluster per month isn't anywhere near a rounding error for many deployments.

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

#405

Post by p_l »

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…

> This is great feedback, but clusters should be treated like cattle, not pets. I'd love to learn more about why your clusters must be so static.

Clusters often are not "cattle". If your operation is big enough, then yes, they might be. Usually they aren't, they are named systems and represent mostly static entity, even if the components of said entity change every hour.

Personally, I'm running in production a cluster that by now had witnessed upgrades from 1.3 to 1.15, in GKE, with some deployments running nearly unchanged since then.

Treating it as cattle makes no sense, especially since on API level, the clusters aren't volatile elements.

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

#406

Post by EpicEng »

geodel wrote: post #370
EpicEng wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... You guys roll out a free service. You tell your sales people to hype it up as a benefit over other providers. You somehow don't anticipate that some users will "abuse" the free service, so you hike up rates for everyone? Sorry, I don't think you're likely to find much empathy on this one.

> You guys roll out a free service. You tell your sales people to hype it up as a benefit over other providers. Strange argument. It is basically what whole world do. Give some free or heavily discounted product or service in hope of gaining market and later on increase price / start charging for that thing.

>It is basically what whole world do

It's not what the whole world does. Many companies gasp start charging for something right away! They're entire sales pitch was that it was free. People made decisions based on that which are not so easy to turn around.

It's a legal form of bait and switch and it's hardly accepted as an ok thing to do by consumers.

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

#407

Post by eatmyshorts »

I guess I need to start migrating my clusters, then. $73 per cluster on my prod, dev, QA, and test clusters is a significant increase for me. Looks like Google is doing their best to kill off GCP - https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/17/google-reportedly-wants-to-b...

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

#408

Post by p_l »

jorams wrote: post #343
nimish wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So ask for Google cloud for startups? One free cluster is enough to get started.

> Google Cloud for Startups is designed to help companies that are backed by VCs, incubators, or accelerators, so it's less applicable for small businesses, services, consultancies, and dev shops.[1] This makes it seem like Google Cloud for Startups is aimed at startups that aren't really on a shoestring budget. [1]: https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/

Like every "special offer for startups", it's a vulture waiting for funding round to close.

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

#409

Post by p_l »

thockingoog wrote: post #271
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…

Those empty clusters that you get for free cost Google money. Perhaps it never should have been free, because that skewed incentives towards models like this.

Unfortunately, even if they switch to dynamically started clusters, the latency of spinning a new cluster is much higher than the latency of adding a bunch of preemptible nodes to existing node pool :/

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

#410

Post by yebyen »

tmpz22 wrote: post #386
zomglings wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In practice, the cert-manager team has made breaking changes in probably close to 1/3 of minor releases (which is really fine pre 1.0, IMHO), there has been comprehensive guidance to lead users or cluster admins through upgrading, that walks through exactly what steps are needed, and followed well does not interrupt your cluster's service in any way.

It's not dark magic, it might make building off of it in the form of integrations prohibitive, but they have done a great job making sure users can upgrade one release to the next.

It is a little bit of a treadmill, but it certainly beats manually renewing certificates!

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