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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/kub

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 https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/pricing.

jerendy92 7y ago
Why is this change coming in? I can hardly see costs on Google's side having increased to provision and 'manage' K8S having increased over the past 3 years, especially given that it's used in production there. Also, given that no-cost K8S clusters was pushed by your sales and marketing teams back in 2018 as a significant benefit for switching to GCP, it doesn't really inspire confidence in GCP if we're just going to be shafted further on down the line. Lastly, $0.1/hour is expensive given that a 'managed' k8s cluster can be rolled out using Terraform and Ansible with a bunch of GCE nodes with minimal effort. This frankly just feels like a cash grab for those that are either inexperienced/unfamiliar with cluster management/provisioning, or from those that are in too deep with GCP and won't have another option other than to pay the piper, so to speak.
- sethvargo 7y ago
  Thank you for the question. While I can't go into deep detail... as with most free things, people find a way to abuse the system. While we've invested significant effort to curtail such abuse, this is the road we've landed. To your point about running your own K8S cluster - two things: 1. That's something you have always been (and still are) entitled to do. 2. Having personally run large-scale K8S clusters, the challenge isn't provisioning, it's maintenance, security patches, upgrades, etc.
  - EpicEng 7y ago
    So... You guys roll out a free service. You tell your sales people to hype it up as a benefit over other providers. You somehow don't anticipate that some users will "abuse" the free service, so you hike up rates for everyone? Sorry, I don't think you're likely to find much empathy on this one.
    - geodel 7y ago
      > You guys roll out a free service. You tell your sales people to hype it up as a benefit over other providers. Strange argument. It is basically what whole world do. Give some free or heavily discounted product or service in hope of gaining market and later on increase price / start charging for that thing.
      - EpicEng 7y ago
        >It is basically what whole world do It's not what the whole world does. Many companies gasp start charging for something right away! They're entire sales pitch was that it was free. People made decisions based on that which are not so easy to turn around. It's a legal form of bait and switch and it's hardly accepted as an ok thing to do by consumers.
jchiu1106 7y ago
This is really disappointing. I've been a big proponent of GKE not only to my employer but to my friends as well. I think it's the best Kubernetes implementation available. The justification for a management fee b/c there are abusers just feels like an excuse for making some extra revenue. Truly with Google's prowess you can detect and deal with abusers without having to raise cost for everybody. I'm worried this is going to dampen the momentum of Kubernetes adoption unfortunately...
- sethvargo 7y ago
  It's not _just_ abuse. It's not _just_ the new SLA. It's also the additional functionality we've built beyond just Kubernetes and how simple we have made the offering and auto-scaling, etc.
sethvargo 7y ago
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22485679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22485679
mleonard 7y ago
Very disappointed. Not by the price increase per se... but by the lack of a reasonable 'always free tier'. I think you should strongly consider tweaking the pricing to provide one or two or three multi-zone clusters for free instead of one single-zone cluster. Let us see the power of GKE without the extra charge and grow on your platform. This would allow new companies to choose gcp over aws/azure and start out with a proper highly available cluster or two/three in different regions and grow to more clusters over time. With the new pricing you're forcing them to choose between a single zone cluster or $70 per month per cluster (or another cloud). Please consider tweaking the new pricing to enable a lower price ramp up for newer companies... why not offer three multi-zone same-region cluster for free and then charge more established enterprises using more than 3 clusters? I appreciate the money is in the big customers... but why scare away the small customers who want 1-3 highly available clusters behind a gclb to provide higher availability and lower global latency. The mindshare of developers will move away from gke if you're not careful... both to aws/azure and others like DO kubernetes. I believe the community is keen to engage with you on this based on the comments in this thread. If your team would like to talk to a disappointment (very small but hoping to grow) customer I'd be happy to jump on a call. I hope others here would be happy to do the same.
- sethvargo 7y ago
  I think you'd be interested in our Google Cloud for Startups program: https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups
  - mleonard 7y ago
    It's a good program. I'm currently in the stage one step before that program. Would your team consider tweaking the pricing as I mentioned, with the goal of helping early stage startups choose GCP? GKE/kubernetes is increasingly not just for big enterprise. Personally I find GKE as easy as app engine or cloud run but much more future proof and more flexible/powerful... the real heart of a GCP to rival AWS. Just this week I set up Config Connector to provision a global load balancer and other GCP resources used by two clusters. An always free tier of two or three (ideally multi zone clusters) would I think go a long way to earn the trust and belief of many devs and early stage startups. As would coming back in the next few days with tweaked pricing based on community feedback. Edit: Additional comments: You could limit the number of nodes in the always-free-tier clusters. Above n nodes the free tier clusters aren't free. With the new pricing, I can't choose to use GKE instead of app engine/cloud run and get the same availability without having to pay for both the nodes and the new control plane cost. Those managed products run over multiple zones in a region. It's disappointing that even just one multi-zone cluster is charged.
numbsafari 7y ago
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 managing GKE backplanes is a non-trivial expense, but I generally assumed that that cost was amortized out, just like I don't pay for the backplane that runs GCE and the rest of GCP's service suite. I also appreciate that you mention some customers are perhaps taking advantage of this "free" resource. But, isn't that quotas are for? Frankly, more concerning than the fact that now I have a new $73/mo. fee attached to my account (which, is not the end of the world) is that this really comes out of left field, and in the context of concerns about the the nature of GCP's new leadership, and reports of Google leadership debating GCP as a going concern. I realize a lot of that isn't well founded, but it's surprises like this one that keep that narrative alive. AWS ain't no saint, but they are pretty consistently who they are: not full of bad surprises. This just leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and makes me wonder if I can expect other surprising cost increases, or perhaps, if these don't "work", worse surprises like deprecation notices. Is this the precursor to you all discontinuing GKE because, as the DevRel class likes to tweet, nobody should be using Kubernetes if they can use (more expensive) services like Cloud Run? Are we about to get Oracled?
- sethvargo 7y ago
  > 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 amortized out <googlehat>I'm not really sure.</googlehat> <civilian>My guess would be that, initially, this was the case. However, over time, people have created many zero-node clusters. Now the amortization isn't. Again, pure speculation.</civilian> > But, isn't that quotas are for? See my comment above about zero-node clusters. > I have a new $73/mo. fee attached to my account (which, is not the end of the world) is that this really comes out of left field... Acknowledge, but I do want to highlight that changes take place a few months from now (June 2020), not immediately. Furthermore, each billing account gets one zonal cluster with no management fee. > Is this the precursor to you all discontinuing GKE because, as the DevRel class likes to tweet, nobody should be using Kubernetes if they can use (more expensive) services like Cloud Run? 100% no. Also, Cloud Run is almost always cheaper than running a Kubernetes cluster. > Are we about to get Oracled? I'm not sure what you mean by that verb.
awslattery 7y ago
Hey Seth, thanks for taking to the comments here; sad I wouldn't be able to catch one of your talks at Next this year in-person. I'd like to share some feedback that echoes that of other commentators, from a different perspective. I run a local cloud developer community with regional pull for attendees, as well as working directly with local early-stage startups looking to become cloud-native. GCP has always been my go-to for recommendation for our attendees (mix of developers and technical founders, and some enterprise technology folks) given the affordability factor, pathways to additional credits to flesh out ideas, learn new technologies, or stretch the limited runway of their new organization, and ultimately my belief that GCP is one of, if not the best, clouds for developers given the investment in documentation and engagement DevRel channels. With the rollback of open-enrollment into a smaller plan of Google Cloud for Startups, and price changes like this, I'm fearing I've chosen the wrong hill to die on when talking with these new customers. I appreciate the inclusion of a free regional cluster per account, which will still afford myself the opportunity to demonstrate k8s at meetups and to end users without taking more of an out-of-pocket hit, and for folks to learn on their own or maintain hobbyist projects on the same budgets they are accustomed to. My fear with this announcement is that the negative repercussions of this will not be felt on the bottom line or figures that it seems more and more is the priority of the Google Cloud leaders. Rather, it will be felt hardest by the smaller customers; the hobbyist developer or technical co-founder looking to learn new technologies, to scale up their operations, and who at least in my experience, are driving growth in the mindspace around GCP in their communities. Put another way, moves like this will further tarnish the reputation of Google for those who the sales engineers have for the last two years, promoted heavily no cluster management fees like "the other guys," and in the eyes of many starting out in these areas (of which I recognize most will never become the big customers that satisfy the requirements of executives). I hope that when the dust settles, this does not lead to a retraction of what makes Google Cloud great in my mind, which is specifically to developer experience and outreach. With that in said, I would suggest really driving home this change through dismissable in-console communication at the point of cluster creation, on the dashboard, and in email communication to folks who this will impact, with a clear picture of the impact on them. No one wants another large disruption of thousands of small organizations and users, as was the case with the Google Maps pricing change. Personally, I'd love to see it increased to one free regional or zonal cluster per account for the remainder of 2020, and then making only one zonal free per account effective 2021. Given the uncertainty around engineer capacity and scheduling given the ongoing human malware crisis affecting companies large and small, I think this could be a good middle ground to satisfy most customers affected by these changes, while still achieving the objective of moving this away from being a loss leader of sorts.
Glyptodon 7y ago
This change is pretty huge for non-revenue units & small teams at institutions and SMBs. These smaller teams often seem to run two clusters rather than try to split their production and dev environments within one cluster (I think this is even widely recommended for smaller, less experienced outfits). For many the management fee will probably be a large percentage cost increase for units that are very cost sensitive and require significant re-engineering to avoid for units where engineer hours a scarce resource. Seems weird, given that GKE is basically the main reason people seem to use Google Cloud. These kinds of users aren't big fish, but I suspect a lot of them are going to run.
- donmcronald 7y ago
  Yeah. Having 1 free cluster will just encourage SMBs and hobbyists to resort to the bad practice of commingling dev and production, wont it? It's the same attitude that GitLab has with a lot of their CI stuff. It's not only huge enterprises that want to try to follow best practices.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  It's one free cluster per billing account. Have separate billing accounts for dev and prod usage of GCP. Probably a good idea to follow separate accounts on any cloud, for that matter.
future_i_snow 7y ago
Hi Seth - I am a LONG time lurker here on HN, but this news just forced me to create an account. I am part of a small company which has separated our deployment into a number of sub projects, some of which are: dev, staging, production, ci, etc. The difference for us will be several hundred dollars per month, and that will make an actual (negative) difference for us. We didn't need a "financially backed SLA" before and we don't need it now. You asked for a question and here it is: Why isn't a financially backed SLA a part of a billing negotiation? I mean, there are some really cool features in "Anthos" but I am not picking up a phone to find out how much that is going to cost. If a really useful feature like "Cloud Run for GKE" is awkwardly placed in the "Anthos" box, then why isn't the SLA part of "Anthos" too? Free clusters was a huge part of why we selected GCP. If this SLA nonsense isn't made optional, our next project is not landing on GCP.
- sethvargo 7y ago
  Thank you for the feedback. I'll relay this to the product team. I feel your frustration and, unfortunately, I do not have much to offer beyond my promise to relay this feedback and the items I've expressed in other responses.
GKE_Greed 7y ago
Hi Seth, two messages this change is sending: 1) GCP can arbitrarily add additional fees to services we consume whenever a PM is under pressure to increase revenue. 2) GCP pricing only goes one direction: UP I know you are just the messenger here, and I send my sincere sympathies that you have to work with a product manager there that can't compute strategic impact of this change :)
cagataygurturk 7y ago
This decision is penny wise and pound foolish.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

jerendy92 7y ago

Why is this change coming in? I can hardly see costs on Google's side having increased to provision and 'manage' K8S having increased over the past 3 years, especially given that it's used in production there. Also, given that no-cost K8S clusters was pushed by your sales and marketing teams back in 2018 as a significant benefit for switching to GCP, it doesn't really inspire confidence in GCP if we're just going to be shafted further on down the line. Lastly, $0.1/hour is expensive given that a 'managed' k8s cluster can be rolled out using Terraform and Ansible with a bunch of GCE nodes with minimal effort. This frankly just feels like a cash grab for those that are either inexperienced/unfamiliar with cluster management/provisioning, or from those that are in too deep with GCP and won't have another option other than to pay the piper, so to speak.

sethvargo 7y ago
Thank you for the question. While I can't go into deep detail... as with most free things, people find a way to abuse the system. While we've invested significant effort to curtail such abuse, this is the road we've landed. To your point about running your own K8S cluster - two things: 1. That's something you have always been (and still are) entitled to do. 2. Having personally run large-scale K8S clusters, the challenge isn't provisioning, it's maintenance, security patches, upgrades, etc.
- EpicEng 7y ago
  So... You guys roll out a free service. You tell your sales people to hype it up as a benefit over other providers. You somehow don't anticipate that some users will "abuse" the free service, so you hike up rates for everyone? Sorry, I don't think you're likely to find much empathy on this one.
  - geodel 7y ago
    > You guys roll out a free service. You tell your sales people to hype it up as a benefit over other providers. Strange argument. It is basically what whole world do. Give some free or heavily discounted product or service in hope of gaining market and later on increase price / start charging for that thing.
    - EpicEng 7y ago
      >It is basically what whole world do It's not what the whole world does. Many companies gasp start charging for something right away! They're entire sales pitch was that it was free. People made decisions based on that which are not so easy to turn around. It's a legal form of bait and switch and it's hardly accepted as an ok thing to do by consumers.

jchiu1106 7y ago

This is really disappointing. I've been a big proponent of GKE not only to my employer but to my friends as well. I think it's the best Kubernetes implementation available. The justification for a management fee b/c there are abusers just feels like an excuse for making some extra revenue. Truly with Google's prowess you can detect and deal with abusers without having to raise cost for everybody. I'm worried this is going to dampen the momentum of Kubernetes adoption unfortunately...

sethvargo 7y ago
It's not _just_ abuse. It's not _just_ the new SLA. It's also the additional functionality we've built beyond just Kubernetes and how simple we have made the offering and auto-scaling, etc.

sethvargo 7y ago

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22485679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22485679

mleonard 7y ago

Very disappointed. Not by the price increase per se... but by the lack of a reasonable 'always free tier'. I think you should strongly consider tweaking the pricing to provide one or two or three multi-zone clusters for free instead of one single-zone cluster. Let us see the power of GKE without the extra charge and grow on your platform. This would allow new companies to choose gcp over aws/azure and start out with a proper highly available cluster or two/three in different regions and grow to more clusters over time. With the new pricing you're forcing them to choose between a single zone cluster or $70 per month per cluster (or another cloud). Please consider tweaking the new pricing to enable a lower price ramp up for newer companies... why not offer three multi-zone same-region cluster for free and then charge more established enterprises using more than 3 clusters? I appreciate the money is in the big customers... but why scare away the small customers who want 1-3 highly available clusters behind a gclb to provide higher availability and lower global latency. The mindshare of developers will move away from gke if you're not careful... both to aws/azure and others like DO kubernetes. I believe the community is keen to engage with you on this based on the comments in this thread. If your team would like to talk to a disappointment (very small but hoping to grow) customer I'd be happy to jump on a call. I hope others here would be happy to do the same.

sethvargo 7y ago
I think you'd be interested in our Google Cloud for Startups program: https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups
- mleonard 7y ago
  It's a good program. I'm currently in the stage one step before that program. Would your team consider tweaking the pricing as I mentioned, with the goal of helping early stage startups choose GCP? GKE/kubernetes is increasingly not just for big enterprise. Personally I find GKE as easy as app engine or cloud run but much more future proof and more flexible/powerful... the real heart of a GCP to rival AWS. Just this week I set up Config Connector to provision a global load balancer and other GCP resources used by two clusters. An always free tier of two or three (ideally multi zone clusters) would I think go a long way to earn the trust and belief of many devs and early stage startups. As would coming back in the next few days with tweaked pricing based on community feedback. Edit: Additional comments: You could limit the number of nodes in the always-free-tier clusters. Above n nodes the free tier clusters aren't free. With the new pricing, I can't choose to use GKE instead of app engine/cloud run and get the same availability without having to pay for both the nodes and the new control plane cost. Those managed products run over multiple zones in a region. It's disappointing that even just one multi-zone cluster is charged.

numbsafari 7y ago

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 managing GKE backplanes is a non-trivial expense, but I generally assumed that that cost was amortized out, just like I don't pay for the backplane that runs GCE and the rest of GCP's service suite. I also appreciate that you mention some customers are perhaps taking advantage of this "free" resource. But, isn't that quotas are for? Frankly, more concerning than the fact that now I have a new $73/mo. fee attached to my account (which, is not the end of the world) is that this really comes out of left field, and in the context of concerns about the the nature of GCP's new leadership, and reports of Google leadership debating GCP as a going concern. I realize a lot of that isn't well founded, but it's surprises like this one that keep that narrative alive. AWS ain't no saint, but they are pretty consistently who they are: not full of bad surprises. This just leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and makes me wonder if I can expect other surprising cost increases, or perhaps, if these don't "work", worse surprises like deprecation notices. Is this the precursor to you all discontinuing GKE because, as the DevRel class likes to tweet, nobody should be using Kubernetes if they can use (more expensive) services like Cloud Run? Are we about to get Oracled?

sethvargo 7y ago
> 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 amortized out <googlehat>I'm not really sure.</googlehat> <civilian>My guess would be that, initially, this was the case. However, over time, people have created many zero-node clusters. Now the amortization isn't. Again, pure speculation.</civilian> > But, isn't that quotas are for? See my comment above about zero-node clusters. > I have a new $73/mo. fee attached to my account (which, is not the end of the world) is that this really comes out of left field... Acknowledge, but I do want to highlight that changes take place a few months from now (June 2020), not immediately. Furthermore, each billing account gets one zonal cluster with no management fee. > Is this the precursor to you all discontinuing GKE because, as the DevRel class likes to tweet, nobody should be using Kubernetes if they can use (more expensive) services like Cloud Run? 100% no. Also, Cloud Run is almost always cheaper than running a Kubernetes cluster. > Are we about to get Oracled? I'm not sure what you mean by that verb.

awslattery 7y ago

Hey Seth, thanks for taking to the comments here; sad I wouldn't be able to catch one of your talks at Next this year in-person. I'd like to share some feedback that echoes that of other commentators, from a different perspective. I run a local cloud developer community with regional pull for attendees, as well as working directly with local early-stage startups looking to become cloud-native. GCP has always been my go-to for recommendation for our attendees (mix of developers and technical founders, and some enterprise technology folks) given the affordability factor, pathways to additional credits to flesh out ideas, learn new technologies, or stretch the limited runway of their new organization, and ultimately my belief that GCP is one of, if not the best, clouds for developers given the investment in documentation and engagement DevRel channels. With the rollback of open-enrollment into a smaller plan of Google Cloud for Startups, and price changes like this, I'm fearing I've chosen the wrong hill to die on when talking with these new customers. I appreciate the inclusion of a free regional cluster per account, which will still afford myself the opportunity to demonstrate k8s at meetups and to end users without taking more of an out-of-pocket hit, and for folks to learn on their own or maintain hobbyist projects on the same budgets they are accustomed to. My fear with this announcement is that the negative repercussions of this will not be felt on the bottom line or figures that it seems more and more is the priority of the Google Cloud leaders. Rather, it will be felt hardest by the smaller customers; the hobbyist developer or technical co-founder looking to learn new technologies, to scale up their operations, and who at least in my experience, are driving growth in the mindspace around GCP in their communities. Put another way, moves like this will further tarnish the reputation of Google for those who the sales engineers have for the last two years, promoted heavily no cluster management fees like "the other guys," and in the eyes of many starting out in these areas (of which I recognize most will never become the big customers that satisfy the requirements of executives). I hope that when the dust settles, this does not lead to a retraction of what makes Google Cloud great in my mind, which is specifically to developer experience and outreach. With that in said, I would suggest really driving home this change through dismissable in-console communication at the point of cluster creation, on the dashboard, and in email communication to folks who this will impact, with a clear picture of the impact on them. No one wants another large disruption of thousands of small organizations and users, as was the case with the Google Maps pricing change. Personally, I'd love to see it increased to one free regional or zonal cluster per account for the remainder of 2020, and then making only one zonal free per account effective 2021. Given the uncertainty around engineer capacity and scheduling given the ongoing human malware crisis affecting companies large and small, I think this could be a good middle ground to satisfy most customers affected by these changes, while still achieving the objective of moving this away from being a loss leader of sorts.

Glyptodon 7y ago

This change is pretty huge for non-revenue units & small teams at institutions and SMBs. These smaller teams often seem to run two clusters rather than try to split their production and dev environments within one cluster (I think this is even widely recommended for smaller, less experienced outfits). For many the management fee will probably be a large percentage cost increase for units that are very cost sensitive and require significant re-engineering to avoid for units where engineer hours a scarce resource. Seems weird, given that GKE is basically the main reason people seem to use Google Cloud. These kinds of users aren't big fish, but I suspect a lot of them are going to run.

donmcronald 7y ago
Yeah. Having 1 free cluster will just encourage SMBs and hobbyists to resort to the bad practice of commingling dev and production, wont it? It's the same attitude that GitLab has with a lot of their CI stuff. It's not only huge enterprises that want to try to follow best practices.
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
It's one free cluster per billing account. Have separate billing accounts for dev and prod usage of GCP. Probably a good idea to follow separate accounts on any cloud, for that matter.

future_i_snow 7y ago

Hi Seth - I am a LONG time lurker here on HN, but this news just forced me to create an account. I am part of a small company which has separated our deployment into a number of sub projects, some of which are: dev, staging, production, ci, etc. The difference for us will be several hundred dollars per month, and that will make an actual (negative) difference for us. We didn't need a "financially backed SLA" before and we don't need it now. You asked for a question and here it is: Why isn't a financially backed SLA a part of a billing negotiation? I mean, there are some really cool features in "Anthos" but I am not picking up a phone to find out how much that is going to cost. If a really useful feature like "Cloud Run for GKE" is awkwardly placed in the "Anthos" box, then why isn't the SLA part of "Anthos" too? Free clusters was a huge part of why we selected GCP. If this SLA nonsense isn't made optional, our next project is not landing on GCP.

sethvargo 7y ago
Thank you for the feedback. I'll relay this to the product team. I feel your frustration and, unfortunately, I do not have much to offer beyond my promise to relay this feedback and the items I've expressed in other responses.

GKE_Greed 7y ago

Hi Seth, two messages this change is sending: 1) GCP can arbitrarily add additional fees to services we consume whenever a PM is under pressure to increase revenue. 2) GCP pricing only goes one direction: UP I know you are just the messenger here, and I send my sincere sympathies that you have to work with a product manager there that can't compute strategic impact of this change :)

cagataygurturk 7y ago

This decision is penny wise and pound foolish.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]