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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

#351

Are there any other companies doing managed Kubernetes in GCP? If there was interest I could try to build a third party clone of GKE running in all GCP regions and still managing GCP VM's, and I could run it for a lot less than $0.10 per hour (although obviously it would take many months of refinement till I could offer a decent SLA)

Azure and AWS both have managed Kubernetes ...

But a lot of businesses have a reason to stick to GCP. For example if you need access to TPU's... You can't easily use Azure kubernetes with the actual VM's running in GCP...

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

#352
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've seen looks like managing k8s on your own often ends up requiring a dedicated team to keep with their insane release cycle.

Can confirm. Depending on your cluster size you will need at least 2 dedicated people on the "Kubernetes" team. You'll probably also end up rolling-your-own deployment tools because K8s API is a little overwhelming for most devs.

I started learning Kubernetes and was overwhelmed. The biggest problem was the missing docs. I filed a Github issue asking for missing Kubernetes YAML docs:

https://github.com/kubernetes/website/issues/19139

Google will ignore it like all of the tickets I file. The fact is that Google is in the business of making money and they are focused on enterprise users. Enterprise users are not sensitive to integration difficulty since they can just throw people at any problems. So eventually everything Google makes will become extremely time-consuming to learn and difficult to use. They're becoming another Oracle.

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

#353
post #81
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GCP is actually more the 3rd inferior option, behind Azure. Gartner lists Azure as just behind AWS for IaaS providers, and GCP a more distant 3rd: https://pages.awscloud.com/Gartner-Magic-Quadrant-for-Infras...

Gcp is not gke. In my opinion the gke offering fromg gcp is the best right now.

i kind of agree, after trying AKS, EKS and GKE. GKE blows everyone out of the water.

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

#354

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…

> clusters should be treated like cattle, not pets. Off-topic, but is this really how people do k8s these days? Years ago when I was at Google, each physical datacenter had at most several "clusters", which would have fifty thousand cores and run every job from every team. A single k8s cluster is already a task management system (with a lot of complexity), so what do people gain by having many clusters, other than mo…

The most common thing I've heard is "blast radius reduction", i.e. the general public are not yet smart enough to run large shared infrastructures. That seems something that should be obviously true.

People had exactly the same experiences with Mesos and OpenStack, but k8s has decent tooling for turning up many clusters, so there is an easy workaround

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

#355

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.…

How much would it cost for you to provision and colocate your own hardware, run a k8s cluster, and manage upgrades? You might not be at the scale where this is feasible yet since that's probably multiple full-time engineers, but eventually the cost functions intersect.

Well, we don't even have a dedicated ops person.

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

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

In addition, AWS charges only ever go down. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a price increase.

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

#357

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…

>> Are we about to get Oracled?

> I'm not sure what you mean by that verb.

The CEO of Google Cloud is the former President of Product Development at Oracle Corporation. Oracle Corporation has a reputation for being incredibly hostile to their customers, which includes things like "finding creative new ways to charge our customers more money. I mean, what are they going to do, switch to Postgres? lol"

I think the fundamental problem is that Google Cloud's reputation is irreparably harmed by Google's overall reputation among developers. Treating this like a tactical or technical problem ("our solution is the best and cheapest!") is missing the forest for the trees.

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

#358

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…

The 'cluster control plane is free' selling point was basically the _only_ thing I saw from all the different groups I worked with which was in GKE's favor. Yes you can get one free cluster but anyone serious about using Kubernetes would have _at least_ two clusters (a prod and non-prod staging cluster), so unless you're a true hobbyist (and the use case for K8s in that realm is pretty slim unless it's to backstop wo…

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your comment but at $0.10 an hour wouldn't GKE pricing be half of what the EKS pricing for managed control plane at $0.20 an hour?

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/cost-optimization-fo...

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

#359

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…

Re. managing GCP as Kubernetes resources: https://cloud.google.com/config-connector/docs/overview

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

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If the main value of GKE over DIY is $73, you should totally DIY. It's not the fee itself, it's the worry that GKE will do what Google Maps did and massively increase fees with very little notice, causing people to scramble to migrate. Google has a really bad reputation right now when it comes to cancelling projects that people have built their businesses upon, or jacking up fees quickly. The $73 is irrelevant on it…

Google and Google Cloud are largely different businesses, though I understand it's hard to keep that in mind in the context of things like this. I encourage everyone to always stay nimble and keep your eyes on portability. I also encourage you to try to assess the REAL costs of doing things yourself. It's rarely as cheap as you think it is. As a Kubernetes maintainer, I am fanatical about portability. As part of the…

Google and Google Cloud are not largely different businesses to the world at large. That may be true internally, but what you do reflects on the other.

Aside from that, Google has a reputation for pulling this shit, and now Google Cloud does too.

The value you provide is irrelevant to how you make people feel with decisions like this.

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