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

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

#281

Post by dhsuieeh »

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…

Dumb plan, underdogs don't have billion dollar connections. Worse plan because Google has a reputation for bad service.

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

#282

Post by remram »

ssmw wrote: post #256
numbsafari wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the detailed response. > In addition to the raw compute costs for those nodes, there's the SRE overhead for managing, upgrading, and securing them. By that logic, can we expect to see charges for GCP Projects and the GCP Console? Cloud IAM? > people have created many zero-node clusters I'd be really curious what is driving folks to do that. Are they using the backplane for CRDs and custom controllers an…

If abuse of zero-node clusters is an issue, wouldn't it be better to introduce a zero-node cluster fee the same way you charge for unused reserved IP addresses?

Also, how much resource does a 0-node cluster actually use on the control plane?

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

#283

Post by cmhnn »

klingonopera wrote: post #157
klingonopera wrote: post #13

"Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman" [2008] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.com...

I know this is kinda against the guidelines, but just to highlight what an ideological war is being fought, at this moment, my parent post has received 5 upvotes and 6 downvotes, with the last 4 downvotes all occuring in the last minute. On the content, RMS chose a colorful (insulting) language, yes, do hold that against him, because that is wrong, but in my opinion, at the core, his statements are quite legit.

I am grateful for Stallman's efforts but claiming cloud is a nefarious plot no matter the style is not "legit".

As for the voting, join the club. Like all communities online HNN is an often hypocritical cliquefest where the mob will have its way. But at least it's not r ;)

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

#284

Post by sofaofthedamned »

sethvargo wrote: post #49
youngdynasty wrote: post #31

I run a hobby project in multiple zones because low latency is important, and Kubernetes makes it easy to do so. There's no way I'm going to pay an extra $73/mo -- I already pay for the computing resources, this should be free. Looks like I'll be moving away from GKE. It's a shame, I _was_ a big advocate.

We offer one free zonal cluster, which is specifically designed for your use case :)

I have personal experience of a few companies in the UK where GCP are offering 90+% discounts to onboard. GCP are spending hundreds of millions to do this. K8S control-planes are a rounding error compared to this.

You could have grandfathered in current deployments but - nope. In the tech world this is up there with killing Google Reader.

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

#285

Post by foota »

jonas21 wrote: post #260
numbsafari wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the detailed response. > In addition to the raw compute costs for those nodes, there's the SRE overhead for managing, upgrading, and securing them. By that logic, can we expect to see charges for GCP Projects and the GCP Console? Cloud IAM? > people have created many zero-node clusters I'd be really curious what is driving folks to do that. Are they using the backplane for CRDs and custom controllers an…

> I'd be really curious what is driving folks to do that. I was one of those people. I got an email from Google this morning and thought "that's weird. I didn't even know I was running a Kubernetes cluster." I think I created it years ago to work through a Kubernetes tutorial and, since it was free, never bothered to delete it. So, I can imagine this being a problem. Though it seems like having a minimum hourly charg…

That seems like a really good idea, maybe they should look at doing that? As noted, $73 should be a trivial charge both from Google's perspective and the customer's for an actual cluster.

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

#286

Post by vhmaster »

Those who had a chance to look deeper into k8s control structure, can comprehend such movement. There's no free lunch. I mean master nodes, etcd and all that stuff in HA has its costs. That's it. Surprisingly, AWS announced 50% price reduction for EKS control plane January this year :)

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

#287

Post by sofaofthedamned »

sethvargo wrote: post #226
numbsafari wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Seth, Thanks for being the recipient of everyone's (justifiable) frustrations. They probably don't pay you enough. I think, what is especially frustrating about this, is that we do already pay for resources that are provisioned by our K8S clusters. We pay for the network traffic, the storage, the compute. I saw you mention StackDriver... we pay for that as well. I can appreciate that actually setting up and manag…

> 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…

So couldn't you charge the control-plane for zero-node clusters?

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

#288

Post by solatic »

thockingoog wrote: post #206
jerendy92 wrote: post #8

Time to dump GCP then. It's not even that the fee is that large, but rather that this is once again Google failing on a long term commitment and shafting those on their platform once again. This was one of the benefits that was pushed by their sales team when they called us up to market GCP over AWS and their EKS offering. Doesn't matter that they are price matching, Google's inability to actually commit to long term…

If the main value of GKE over DIY is $73, you should totally DIY. I mostly try not to be too Google-focused here, but I have to say... I'm pretty proud of GKE, and I think it offers a lot of value other than just being cheap. Managing clusters is not always easy. GKE handles all of that for you - including integrations, qualifications, upgrades, and patching clusters transparently BEFORE public security disclosures h…

> I don't understand the anger here - you're literally saying you'd rather pay more for a service of lower quality because... why? Because they will continue to charge you more? Does not compute.

This response, right here, is everything you need to understand about why Google Cloud is failing to sell to the enterprise market.

The enterprise market only really cares about one thing: rock solid stability. It doesn't care about features, and it doesn't (really) care about price. It wants a product that it can forget is there.

What's really sad is, technically, GKE is that product. It just works. It is solid. You do get to forget that it's there. Until you get a random email telling you that you get to explain to your boss that your bill is going up next month and your project might end up running over budget as a result.

If you can understand why a large segment of the market prefers to pay a higher but stable charge over a lower but undependable charge, then you can understand why Google Cloud is failing at selling to enterprise.

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

#289

Post by atombender »

thockingoog wrote: post #206
jerendy92 wrote: post #8

Time to dump GCP then. It's not even that the fee is that large, but rather that this is once again Google failing on a long term commitment and shafting those on their platform once again. This was one of the benefits that was pushed by their sales team when they called us up to market GCP over AWS and their EKS offering. Doesn't matter that they are price matching, Google's inability to actually commit to long term…

If the main value of GKE over DIY is $73, you should totally DIY. I mostly try not to be too Google-focused here, but I have to say... I'm pretty proud of GKE, and I think it offers a lot of value other than just being cheap. Managing clusters is not always easy. GKE handles all of that for you - including integrations, qualifications, upgrades, and patching clusters transparently BEFORE public security disclosures h…

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. For a company our size, it's not a huge expense. But these things add up.

Since moving from DigitalOcean, our Google Cloud setup has more than doubled our monthly bill. We're paying for more compute, but certainly not twice the amount, as we've only gone from 14-15 nodes to around 20; it's just more expensive across the board, both node cost and ingress/egress. We're even cost-cutting by using self-hosted services instead of Google's; for example, we use Postgres instead of Cloud SQL. I ran the numbers earlier today; the equivalent on Cloud SQL would be 3.4 times more expensive.

In short, Google Cloud is expensive, and it's not like the bill is getting smaller over time.

Developments like these factor in my choice of cloud provider for future projects.

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

#290

Post by ssmw »

ones_and_zeros wrote: post #175
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…

I agree the rollout is a little bumpy but I'm curious what workloads you are using k8s for where a $74/mo (or $300/mo) bill isn't a rounding error in your capex?

Think about any medium sized dev agency managing 3x environments for 20x customers. That's 50k/year out of the blue.

My problem is that this fee doesn't look very "cloud" friendly. Sure the folks with big clusters won't even notice it, but others will sweat it.

The appeal of cloud is that costs increase as you go, and flat rates are typically there to add predictability (see BigQuery flat rate). This fee does the opposite.

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