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Do you think management nodes are free? Master nodes need to run etcd+kube api. These master nodes are multi region available with HA configured, which will be

by CSDude 8y ago

Do you think management nodes are free? Master nodes need to run etcd+kube api. These master nodes are multi region available with HA configured, which will be expensive even if you use smaller instances yourself. Google might be free but if you are already in AWS and do not want to manage Kubernetes masters at all and treat your worker nodes like cattle, it is a very nice and enough solution. What integration do you need? The good thing about EKS is that it is CNCF Conformant Kubernetes, meaning anything works with upstream Kubernetes works here, including ingress controllers that already work with both ALB and ELB+Nginx. I am not defending Amazon, most of their managed services suck and very slow, but both preview and GA experience of EKS was great and enough for me.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
If management nodes run in containers themselves (managed on AWS VMs), I’d assume a lower cost than what it’d cost to run them on VMs in AWS. Is questioning the cost of a product not a fair question?
derefr 8y ago
> Do you think management nodes are free? ... Google['s management nodes] might be free Indeed they are. Why do you think that is? It could be that they're a great big loss-leader for GKE, or that the costs of GKE management nodes are amortized into the per-cluster-node costs. But neither of these seem to be true. (The pricing of GKE management nodes before they made them free was negligible; and GKE nodes don't cost any more than equivalent GCE nodes.) The real answer, I think, is that K8s management nodes really are just not all that big a deal to run. Certainly not $144/mo of a big deal.
- puzzle 8y ago
  Last time I checked, Google's public renewable energy footprint was 2x Amazon's, as a proximate for the actual footprint, so it's not that crazy to imagine that there are plenty of slack resources to run small VMs or even Borg tasks for these masters.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    AWS is 10x larger than GCP so power and compute capacity are really not the issue here, especially for a product that just launched. There's also no reason AWS couldn't adopt the same lightweight kubernetes master processes that GKE uses after all this time.
    - yebyen 8y ago
      > public renewable energy footprint When electricity is the sole marginal cost of keeping a node powered up from your pool of available machines that can be powered on and off on-demand, these particular words actually mean a lot. I think the point is that GCP can afford to keep some nodes online even when they don't belong to anyone and just eat the cost. (Eg. those renewable resources like wind and the sun just don't cost anything, so why not spend the energy that is generated from them.) I'm sure I'm not giving AWS enough credit. Seeing that Google pretty much invented Kubernetes, their cost to come 'up to speed' enough to provide a managed version of it is effectively nil. Their renewable energy is not the only source of so-called "extra capacity," either... they honestly should have had no trouble staffing a team to build out and promote GKE without siphoning off much more than a nominal amount of developer capacity from other offerings that may need it as well. If it's true that when AWS announced they'd be offering EKS last November, they only had a team of 5 allocated to it, then I guess they deserve a lot of credit for the progress they've made in about 8 months. That cost to AWS is non-zero (I'm also pretty sure the team has grown and is larger than 5 devs now) and they have every reasonable basis to attempt to recoup it. I don't think many AWS customers will disagree. The adopters who have known they need it for a year or more, many who are happily locked into the ecosystem already, will certainly be lining up to pay for this now.
      - puzzle 8y ago
        A more accurate point is not necessarily that Google will keep some more nodes up, but that it can fit small workloads like a Kubernetes master into existing nodes that run other stuff and have bits of spare capacity. Borg's resource estimation is pretty good at squeezing things. I'm thinking specifically of masters for smaller clusters, where the fixed overhead costs of the control plane are relatively high compared to the node count. On larger clusters, the masters will be beefier, sure, but your customer will be paying for enough nodes to make up for their cost and the fixed overhead is more "diluted".
- alpb 8y ago
  Google Kubernetes Engine has announced general availability (GA) of "free" highly-available (HA) control plane support yesterday. You can read more here: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/06/Regional-clusters-in-Google-Kubernetes-Engine-are-now-generally-available.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/06/Regional-cluste... disclaimer: I work at Google.
  - puzzle 8y ago
    Isn't it funny how Google announces free GKE stuff the day before EKS was announced AND made generally available? :-) Like Jobs issuing a press release that the App Store had hit 3B downloads the morning of the Nexus One launch.
    - TheIronYuppie 8y ago
      I would agree with you, but no one (honestly) knew when EKS was being announced at GA, including customers we talked to. I think this was just a coincidence. Disclosure: I work at Google.
    - yebyen 8y ago
      I'd speculate that Google did it on purpose the first time (everyone knew there had to be an announcement coming, and the date of re:Invent was well known in advance.) Given what some are saying in this thread here today, I would not be the least bit surprised to learn that Google's announcement this time actually forced Amazon's hand, and that the folks on this afternoon's Amazon's twitch stream actually found out yesterday that they'd be making the announcement today. (Sure, I'd be speculating, but fight me.)
      - puzzle 8y ago
        Yeah, it was safe to assume they would announce something related at re:Invent, given that they had joined the CNCF a few months before, after simply ignoring Kubernetes for years.
- iampims 8y ago
  It’s subsidized by AdSense. Like every Google product.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Why wouldn't Amazon do the same then when they have a higher market cap than Google and a known reputation to loss-lead an entire vertical to the tune of 100s of millions just to put a competitor out of business?
    - rad_gruchalski 8y ago
      Why would they? Companies will pay anyway. It’s a no cost for deployments in 1000s of $$$ / month.
      - manigandham 8y ago
        This sub-thread was about AWS not having the same resource efficiency as Google, and Google also subsidizing with AdSense which is why GKE is free. So in that sense there is no reason why AWS couldnt also make them free. Not every deployment is $1000s/month. I dont care about EKS, but it will hurt adoption if every single cluster requires a $144/month fee for the master when there are offerings from GCP and Azure that are free and far more polished.
        rad_gruchalski 8y ago
        > Not every deployment is $1000s/month. I dont care about EKS, but it will hurt adoption if every single cluster requires a $144/month fee for the master when there are offerings from GCP and Azure that are free and far more polished. Maybe that's the reasoning behind it. If the service isn't really up to standard yet, it definitely makes sense. Smaller players, when they see an unfinished product, will not come back. Keep the small clients away until the service is more polished by price barring, use the bigger clients who can afford the support, iterate and improve. Time will tell.

by CSDude 8y ago

toomuchtodo 8y ago

If management nodes run in containers themselves (managed on AWS VMs), I’d assume a lower cost than what it’d cost to run them on VMs in AWS. Is questioning the cost of a product not a fair question?

derefr 8y ago

> Do you think management nodes are free? ... Google['s management nodes] might be free Indeed they are. Why do you think that is? It could be that they're a great big loss-leader for GKE, or that the costs of GKE management nodes are amortized into the per-cluster-node costs. But neither of these seem to be true. (The pricing of GKE management nodes before they made them free was negligible; and GKE nodes don't cost any more than equivalent GCE nodes.) The real answer, I think, is that K8s management nodes really are just not all that big a deal to run. Certainly not $144/mo of a big deal.

puzzle 8y ago
Last time I checked, Google's public renewable energy footprint was 2x Amazon's, as a proximate for the actual footprint, so it's not that crazy to imagine that there are plenty of slack resources to run small VMs or even Borg tasks for these masters.
- manigandham 8y ago
  AWS is 10x larger than GCP so power and compute capacity are really not the issue here, especially for a product that just launched. There's also no reason AWS couldn't adopt the same lightweight kubernetes master processes that GKE uses after all this time.
  - yebyen 8y ago
    > public renewable energy footprint When electricity is the sole marginal cost of keeping a node powered up from your pool of available machines that can be powered on and off on-demand, these particular words actually mean a lot. I think the point is that GCP can afford to keep some nodes online even when they don't belong to anyone and just eat the cost. (Eg. those renewable resources like wind and the sun just don't cost anything, so why not spend the energy that is generated from them.) I'm sure I'm not giving AWS enough credit. Seeing that Google pretty much invented Kubernetes, their cost to come 'up to speed' enough to provide a managed version of it is effectively nil. Their renewable energy is not the only source of so-called "extra capacity," either... they honestly should have had no trouble staffing a team to build out and promote GKE without siphoning off much more than a nominal amount of developer capacity from other offerings that may need it as well. If it's true that when AWS announced they'd be offering EKS last November, they only had a team of 5 allocated to it, then I guess they deserve a lot of credit for the progress they've made in about 8 months. That cost to AWS is non-zero (I'm also pretty sure the team has grown and is larger than 5 devs now) and they have every reasonable basis to attempt to recoup it. I don't think many AWS customers will disagree. The adopters who have known they need it for a year or more, many who are happily locked into the ecosystem already, will certainly be lining up to pay for this now.
    - puzzle 8y ago
      A more accurate point is not necessarily that Google will keep some more nodes up, but that it can fit small workloads like a Kubernetes master into existing nodes that run other stuff and have bits of spare capacity. Borg's resource estimation is pretty good at squeezing things. I'm thinking specifically of masters for smaller clusters, where the fixed overhead costs of the control plane are relatively high compared to the node count. On larger clusters, the masters will be beefier, sure, but your customer will be paying for enough nodes to make up for their cost and the fixed overhead is more "diluted".
alpb 8y ago
Google Kubernetes Engine has announced general availability (GA) of "free" highly-available (HA) control plane support yesterday. You can read more here: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/06/Regional-clusters-in-Google-Kubernetes-Engine-are-now-generally-available.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/06/Regional-cluste... disclaimer: I work at Google.
- puzzle 8y ago
  Isn't it funny how Google announces free GKE stuff the day before EKS was announced AND made generally available? :-) Like Jobs issuing a press release that the App Store had hit 3B downloads the morning of the Nexus One launch.
  - TheIronYuppie 8y ago
    I would agree with you, but no one (honestly) knew when EKS was being announced at GA, including customers we talked to. I think this was just a coincidence. Disclosure: I work at Google.
  - yebyen 8y ago
    I'd speculate that Google did it on purpose the first time (everyone knew there had to be an announcement coming, and the date of re:Invent was well known in advance.) Given what some are saying in this thread here today, I would not be the least bit surprised to learn that Google's announcement this time actually forced Amazon's hand, and that the folks on this afternoon's Amazon's twitch stream actually found out yesterday that they'd be making the announcement today. (Sure, I'd be speculating, but fight me.)
    - puzzle 8y ago
      Yeah, it was safe to assume they would announce something related at re:Invent, given that they had joined the CNCF a few months before, after simply ignoring Kubernetes for years.
iampims 8y ago
It’s subsidized by AdSense. Like every Google product.
- manigandham 8y ago
  Why wouldn't Amazon do the same then when they have a higher market cap than Google and a known reputation to loss-lead an entire vertical to the tune of 100s of millions just to put a competitor out of business?
  - rad_gruchalski 8y ago
    Why would they? Companies will pay anyway. It’s a no cost for deployments in 1000s of $$$ / month.
    - manigandham 8y ago
      This sub-thread was about AWS not having the same resource efficiency as Google, and Google also subsidizing with AdSense which is why GKE is free. So in that sense there is no reason why AWS couldnt also make them free. Not every deployment is $1000s/month. I dont care about EKS, but it will hurt adoption if every single cluster requires a $144/month fee for the master when there are offerings from GCP and Azure that are free and far more polished.
      - rad_gruchalski 8y ago
        > Not every deployment is $1000s/month. I dont care about EKS, but it will hurt adoption if every single cluster requires a $144/month fee for the master when there are offerings from GCP and Azure that are free and far more polished. Maybe that's the reasoning behind it. If the service isn't really up to standard yet, it definitely makes sense. Smaller players, when they see an unfinished product, will not come back. Keep the small clients away until the service is more polished by price barring, use the bigger clients who can afford the support, iterate and improve. Time will tell.