Hey everyone - Seth from Google here. Please let us know if you have any questions! You can learn more about the pricing changes at https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/pricing .
This decision is penny wise and pound foolish.
Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster management fee on June 6
411–420 of 633 posts
Re: Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster management fee on June 6
#412Earlier 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…
And no SRE would allow you to run your application in a single cluster. Borg Cells were federated but not codependent - Google's biggest outages were due to the few components that did not sufficiently isolate clusters from one another.
Clusters are probably still pets to most orgs, but the lessons about how to manage complexity still apply. Each of my terraform state files is a pet and I treat it like such... but I also use change-control to assure that even though I don't regularly recreate it from scratch, I understand all that was there.
Re: Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster management fee on June 6
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
My approach with any Google b2b product - always have a plan to migrate out of Google and never agree to anything that locks you to Google. After seeing what they did to Google Maps and Api.AI / Dialogueflow jumped from free to 5k$ overnight - just can't trust them.
> never agree to anything that locks you to Google. How is Google different from other cloud poviders in terms of vendor lock-in?
Google is the most likely to kill off a service you rely on?
AWS _still_ has SimpleDB kicking around. That has been retired as a product for more than 8 years now.
I haven't seen Azure do similar, either, but I haven't paid as much attention to them.
Re: Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster management fee on June 6
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
We use Skaffold and it’s great. I’m talking about very minor unforeseen stuff that causes outages, not that we do it manually.
This is an interesting exchange if only for the thread developing instead of a single reply from a rep; it’s nice to see that level of engagement.
More importantly, this dialogue speaks volumes to Google’s stubbornness. Seth’s/Google’s position is: do it the Google way, sorry-not-sorry to all those that don’t fit into our model.
Like we haven’t heard of infrastructure as code? That can’t paper over basics like being unable to change your K8s cluster control plane. This is precisely the attitude that lands GCP as a distant #3 behind AWS and Azure.
Re: Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster management fee on June 6
#415I guess I need to start migrating my clusters, then. $73 per cluster on my prod, dev, QA, and test clusters is a significant increase for me. Looks like Google is doing their best to kill off GCP - https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/17/google-reportedly-wants-to-b...
Curious where you are going to go that is going to be cheaper for the management plane and work nodes.
Re: Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster management fee on June 6
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
My approach with any Google b2b product - always have a plan to migrate out of Google and never agree to anything that locks you to Google. After seeing what they did to Google Maps and Api.AI / Dialogueflow jumped from free to 5k$ overnight - just can't trust them.
> never agree to anything that locks you to Google. How is Google different from other cloud poviders in terms of vendor lock-in?
Google has a habit of killing off "enterprise" services and applications. Google has a habit of raising prices on services, while I've only ever seen price decreases from AWS and Azure. There is a reason why Azure has seen significantly faster growth than Google, even though both were late entrants to the cloud computing space. It seems that Google is doing their best to shoot themselves in the foot.
I used to recommend GKE as the best way to get started with K8S. With this price change, that advantage is gone. This price change kills off any advantage Google had for getting started in the cloud. Their enterprise-unfriendly habits have already killed off any advantages Google had for established, larger customers of cloud computing.
Re: Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster management fee on June 6
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
EKS is $0.10/hour
Re: Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster management fee on June 6
#418I know the HN crowd hates this sort of thing, but seems reasonable to me. $70/month is a very reasonable price, and most businesses likely have well under 10 clusters (I’d think many just have 2-3, a single cluster for prod and then 1-2 dev/test type environments). This is probably mostly to cut down on edge cases users who are spinning up crazy numbers of clusters for weird reasons, and costing Google a bunch of $$$…
Furthermore, anyone spending enough on compute to warrant k8s shouldn’t balk at all at $70/mo. I think the threshold for introducing the complexity and overhead of k8s isn’t probably until at least $5-10k/mo of spend (and probably 3-10x that in the normal case). Less than that and k8s is a whole lot of overkill.
I do think that $70/mo is reasonable per cluster but don't dismiss the value of k8s even for small projects. I used to bring a project from Ansible to k8s and even though it use only 2 nodes (~$200/mo), the tooling, the abstraction, the snappiness of gke was very much worth the switch.
Re: Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster management fee on June 6
#419This 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…
Who would be the first choice: Amazon or Microsoft?
For K8S, I think the best alternative is AWS+kops. EKS also has a high fee for the control plane, and has a ton of shortcomings aside from that. AKS, at least the last time I used it, was much worse in terms of functionality. But I can spin up a kops-based cluster really quickly. It is capable of creating truly production-grade clusters.
If I'm running a small cluster, I can use a small VM for the master node(s) and get my control plane costs down much lower than $73/month.
Re: Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster management fee on June 6
#420Earlier 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.)
Or move to minikube and friends. If it's a dev environment you can usually get away with such things.
Kubernetes consumes a lot of CPU even when idle, due to the polling design, which makes Minikube is a really poor fit for developer machines. It's well known [1] to sit there eating 20-30% CPU, draining your battery and frustrating your life while doing absolutely nothing. This applies to all the Kubernetes distributions, including Kind and Docker Desktop. Not sure if the same applies to K3s, though.
[1] https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube/issues/3207, https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/3065, https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/3539, etc; there must be dozens and dozens of these