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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

#331

Post by te_chris »

sethvargo wrote: post #154
rolleiflex wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. What’s inside our clusters are indeed cattle, but the clusters themselves do carry a lot of config that is set via GCP UI for trivial things like firewall rules. Of course we could script it and automate, but your CLI tool also changes fast enough that it becomes an ongoing…

Hmm - have you considered a tool like Terraform or Deployment manager for creating the clusters? In general, it's best practice to capture that configuration as code.

Even still it’s not like it’s non-trivial to just bring up and drop clusters. Just setting up peering with cloud sql or https certs with GKE ingress can be fraught with timing issues that can torpedo the whole provisioning process.

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

#332

Post by Glyptodon »

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…

I think the reason a lot of people create zero node clusters is that they want to "turn off" their cluster without destroying its current configuration or state, which otherwise doesn't seem possible.

I may be missing something here, but my guess is that a lot of people turn to GKE to learn how to use K8s, and then are like "wait, I'm in the middle of this project/tutorial/etc., but I don't want to be billed overnight when it's literally just going to be doing nothing, what do I do?" and find Stack Overflow or something recommending you just scale it to zero. See questions like this: https://serverfault.com/questions/877619/turn-off-a-cluster-...

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

#333

Post by aludwin »

outworlder wrote: post #198
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.)

Assuming you can do that, and your system is not using namespacing for its own purposes.

I know kubeflow can use namespaces for its own purposes, but otherwise I thought that was quite rare. Namespaces are intended to be used for exactly this usecase (isolating teams and/or workloads).

What kind of system have you seen where this isn't true?

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

#334

Post by atombender »

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…

We have about 200 long-running pods right now. On Cloud Run, that would cost us more than $12,000 in CPU alone, and that's excluding memory and request costs.

That also excludes stateful apps like Elasticsearch that would not be able to run on Cloud Run. Not sure what Google product is appropriate there.

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

#335

Post by sah2ed »

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 ... Does not compute.

The saying: “the market’s perception is your reality”, is especially apt here. Google’s decision makers tends to forget that in the end they are dealing with human customers not machines. Contrary to the concept of economic rationality, humans are notorious for exhibiting behavior that, to the untrained eye, appear irrational.

A commenter helpfully explained their perception of the new pricing change:

“The anger comes from, a product was free and now it is not. A lot of people made architectural choices that depended on the price of 0. (You mentioned these cases in your post). However, i believe the bigger issue is, that Google Cloud broke essentially a promise.”

IOW, from their perspective, the pricing change was framed as a loss [1] which opened up a host of negative emotions (anger, mistrust, etc) that come with mitigating a loss that is imminent.

Google as an engineering company may look down on fields like psychology or behavioral econs, but if they genuinely want a fighting chance against AWS and Azure, they will need to court sales leaders with a strong humanities tinge, to avoid these kinds of decision-making that achieve the opposite intended effect — eroding people’s trust in GCP.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion

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

#336

Post by etchalon »

partiallypro wrote: post #247
etchalon wrote: post #33

Time to start looking into DigitalOcean more seriously. G Cloud is already unreasonably expensive and nearly impossible to price manage. It's cool to see them double-down on that.

Outside of just hating Microsoft...why not Azure?

Azure is as expensive as G Cloud, and less robust.

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

#337

Post by praveenperera »

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…

But DigitalOcean has managed K8s now: https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/

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

#338

Post by briffle »

zomglings wrote: post #325
briffle wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use google cloud projects to isolate customers and environments. (Some of our clients are old school and VERY scared of cloud, and multi-tenant). so for our pretty small company, we have >60 projects, each with a k8s cluster. that is a pretty good bump in costs come this summer. Historically, we have powered down all the compute in a project that isn't needed, but left the k8s cluster in place (with its compute no…

Perhaps the right thing for GKE to do is introduce a cluster snapshot. Sounds like a great feature.

That would actually be pretty awesome.

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

#339

Post by pdelgallego »

saltysugar wrote: post #297
marcinzm wrote: post #60

I don't offhand remember AWS increasing prices for a service before but I might be wrong. How often does Google increase prices? For a business I prefer a company that starts with higher prices and then only lowers them to one that may increase them at any time.

Having worked for AWS, one of the things we got a lot push back from was offering something free and then walk back from it. AWS really strongly focuses on gaining customer trust, and they will only lower price, and never increase price. They won't turn off things until the last customer stops using it (they might stop new customers from onboarding) I did not enjoy working for AWS so I left pretty fast, but some of t…

For a AWS product manager, pricing is a one-way door once you cross it there is no way back from it you.

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

#340

Post by physicles »

Niksko wrote: post #222
txomon wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

EKS only gives you 99.9% uptime, and I'm uncertain as to whether you could achieve more than 99.9% uptime on your own by DIYing your cluster in a public cloud provider without doing multi-region.

To put that in perspective, three 9’s allows you about 9 hours of downtime a year, which will certainly require multi-region and a dedicated ops team.

Two and a half 9’s is a whole different story. We achieved about 20 hours of downtime last year even without HA on k8s bare metal in Alibaba cloud. But I’m uncertain whether that’s a feat we can repeat this year.

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