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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

#101

Post by geerlingguy »

whalesalad wrote: post #65
itake wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DO is pretty famous for losing data. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17225665

DO is famous for being a pain in the ass. They’re great for tiny hobby things but honestly I’d never run a prod/serious/client workload there. Too many issues. I’ve had multiple clients lose a droplet due to a simple credit card expiration. It’s a race to the bottom on price so this doesn’t surprise me. They chose this life.

To be fair, what is the best way to handle expiring credit cards? For one of my SaaS products, I give a 30 day grace period, then delete the data. If they didn't have a backup, that's on them...

If they delete the droplet the second a single CC payment fails, that's one thing, but I don't believe that's how their system works.

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

#102

Post by EpicEng »

sethvargo wrote: post #45
jerendy92 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this change coming in? I can hardly see costs on Google's side having increased to provision and 'manage' K8S having increased over the past 3 years, especially given that it's used in production there. Also, given that no-cost K8S clusters was pushed by your sales and marketing teams back in 2018 as a significant benefit for switching to GCP, it doesn't really inspire confidence in GCP if we're just going to…

Thank you for the question. While I can't go into deep detail... as with most free things, people find a way to abuse the system. While we've invested significant effort to curtail such abuse, this is the road we've landed. To your point about running your own K8S cluster - two things: 1. That's something you have always been (and still are) entitled to do. 2. Having personally run large-scale K8S clusters, the chall…

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.

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

#103

Post by matwood »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #77
marcinzm wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different companies make money using different approaches and it's perfectly valid to be upset at the approach a particular company is taking. Just because they provide a service doesn't mean they'll try to f * you over at every chance. For some it's bad long term business to do that. AWS, for example, begins with high prices and then lowers them over time. It costs money but you know the maximum. Google seems to be…

> AWS, for example, begins with high prices and then lowers them over time. It costs money but you know the maximum. Past performance is no guarantee of future benevolence or reasonable behavior.

> Past performance is no guarantee of future benevolence or reasonable behavior.

Sure, but pushing prices down and eating competitors margin to the benefit of the customer has been Amazon's MO since inception.

Google seems to make a lot of missteps wrt pricing and the cloud. Remember the geo pricing change that put a lot of projects out of business??

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

#104

Post by EpicEng »

minimaxir wrote: post #9

I think this is fair : for hobbyists, a free zonal cluster is sufficient and you probably wouldn't use more than one cluster. For businesses/revenue drivers, the $7.30/mo/cluster is nothing (EDIT: actually $73/mo/cluster, which may be a tougher sell but if the business is in a case where it benefits from Kubernetes, it's still likely insignificant relative to the cost of actually running the VMs on it )

What's unfair about the situation is the fact that Google's sales people hyped this up as an advantage over other providers for years.

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

#106

Post by rolleiflex »

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.)

That’s interesting - I think you’re right. We might move our staging cluster into our main production deployment.

More likely though, AWS or OpenShift running on bare metal on a beefy ATX tower in the office. We want to have production and staging as close to each other as possible, so this is an additional reason and a p0 flag on reducing the dependency on Google-specific bits of Kubernetes as much as possible, hopefully also useful for our exit strategy as well.

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

#107

Post by pojzon »

tmpz22 wrote: post #71
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…

Too many people drank the cloud kool-aid. The move from day one was to create provider agnostic cloud architectures and repent the use of provider-specific services. That said they do make it damn hard. Our k8s cluster is as basic as it comes, no databases, simple deployments, but we do still have a dependency on Google Cloud Loadbalancer (which we hate). If pricing goes up too much from this we'll move, but the GCL…

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.

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

#108

Post by dward »

rolleiflex wrote: post #90
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.

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…

GKE can't offer financial backed SLOs without charging for the service. This is something that, I assume, significant customers want and that competitors already have:

https://aws.amazon.com/eks/sla/

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

#109

Post by lilbobbytables »

rolleiflex wrote: post #90
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.

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…

> and the docs linked from the email are not updated yet.

That about sums up most things Google does for developers.

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

#110

Post by toomuchtodo »

matwood wrote: post #103
toomuchtodo wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AWS, for example, begins with high prices and then lowers them over time. It costs money but you know the maximum. Past performance is no guarantee of future benevolence or reasonable behavior.

> Past performance is no guarantee of future benevolence or reasonable behavior. Sure, but pushing prices down and eating competitors margin to the benefit of the customer has been Amazon's MO since inception. Google seems to make a lot of missteps wrt pricing and the cloud. Remember the geo pricing change that put a lot of projects out of business??

Amazon's bandwidth charges are still extortionate. Have those ever gone down?
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