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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

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 support, servicing, pricing or features across any of their products is tiresome. Time to move business elsewhere to AWS or Azure. They may be more expensive, but at least we know what we are paying for, and that it's going to stay that way for a significant length of time.

sethvargo 7y ago
Thank you for the feedback. > Google's inability to actually commit to long term support... This is _exactly_ what Google is doing in this case. We are providing an SLA - a legal agreement of availability and support. These changes introduce a guaranteed availability of the management control plane.
- sladey 7y ago
  Shouldn't that be opt-in? The management control plane is not something we consider critical to operations. I'd happily accept if it was unavailable for 1 and a half minutes a day versus these additional costs.
  - sethvargo 7y ago
    That's great feedback. I'll relay that to the product team. IANAL, but I think it would be legally challenging.
    - sladey 7y ago
      IANAL either, but I don't see why it would be? Just have a separate cluster type, e.g SLA Zonal, SLA Regional. The SLA already differentiates the current cluster types. Anthos Clusters are also not subject to any additional fees? And having it opt-in will save face with those users of GKE where an additional $73/m is significant.
    - waffle_ss 7y ago
      Hard to understand how it would be legally challenging. ISP's do it all the time when differentiating their business plans from residential. Both services run over the same infrastructure and you typically get the same/similar speeds, but a key difference is an SLA with the business plan.
    - bavell 7y ago
      Opt-in for the SLA and additional cluster cost would be fantastic. We run pretty small clusters but don't need any additional SLA's on top of what's already provided. Frankly we could care less about the control plane SLA.
    - merb 7y ago
      btw. I would prefer to have something like a cost reduce if the cluster runs 24/7. Currently we also do not need that amount of SLA. but we actually have a single cluster and are a really small customer that reall choose GKE, because of no management fee (i.e. nodes are really expensive compared to non cloud providers). But we never used more than one REGIONAL cluster (we also never spun up a new one, we only change workers). And now it will cost us money. What a shame. P.S.: german sites have the pricing wrong.
- jerendy92 7y ago
  Sure, in this case I can see that. I was referring to those four points with respect to Google services in general. I'm sure I don't need to dig up a list of features and services that have been merged, shuttered, price hiked or moved into a different product suite over the years. Admittedly a lot of the issues are with the GSuite side of things, but it's sad to see this coming to GCP as well. On a hopefully more constructive note, if this is the way it's going to be from now on, I would at least expect to see an exemption on such a management fee/SLA on preemptible nodes - having an SLA and management fee on the cluster whereby nodes can be killed in a 30 second window without prior warning seems to be a little more than pointless.
  - sethvargo 7y ago
    Even if your worker nodes are pre-emptible, the master nodes are not. The management fee covers running those master nodes and many other core GCP integrations (like Stackdriver logging and other advanced functionality). Billing is computed on a per-second basis for each cluster. The total amount will be rounded to the nearest penny at the end of the month.
- txomon 7y ago
  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 enough, they will increase the price. They are the Ryanair of the cloud. Edit 1: moreover, it will increase the cost of composer, and on top of that, the recommended pattern where composer is paired with a kubernetes cluster for executing the workloads
  - allendoerfer 7y ago
    > They are the Ryanair of the cloud. Isn't Ryanair literally the Ryanair of the cloud(s)?
  - Niksko 7y ago
    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.
    - physicles 7y ago
      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.
  - bartread 7y ago
    > Finally, the pricing changes are starting to look like a pattern, every time Google deems the usage of a product is good enough, they will increase the price. To be fair this is hardly new and by no means limited to Google. Any number of SaaS startups that have survived to at least moderate success have done similar things. Look at UserVoice as an example: started out with a free tier plus some reasonable paid tiers with transparent pricing, then a year or two back killed the free tier and moved to a non-transparent "enterprise" pricing model with absolutely exhorbitant fees. Plenty of other companies offer free to build their userbase and reach, then either water down the free tier, or remove it entirely. It's practically the SV modus operandi for the last decade.
- notyourday 7y ago
  > We are providing an SLA - a legal agreement of availability and support. Do I still have to pay the bill first, fill out forms, get account managers involved, at some point receive a partial credit, and repeat this until the delta between what I was expected as the SLA credit and what I got as the SLA credit is less than the cost of the time to fight for another cycle?
simplecto 7y ago
Never trust free without an escape hatch.
tpetry 7y ago
What? A 73$ price difference to AWS was their main selling point?
- jerendy92 7y ago
  It depends entirely on how a firm has their infrastructure set up - if you have small cluster(s) per client for isolation/compliance purposes, you end up with, for example with 250 clients, each one using, say, 1000 billable hours/month: 250 * 0.1 * 1000 = $25,000/month. This is quite the price hike for something that was a) free until now. b) Not a service that warrants such a fee given that it uses existing (GCE) resources and can frankly be done manually by one of the DevOps engineers for a few hours/month and some scripting. It's just a charge for convenience it seems.
  - sethvargo 7y ago
    You keep noting how "easy" it is to provision and manage a Kubernetes cluster. From experience, properly securing and maintaining a Kubernetes cluster is a multi-person full-time job.
    - jerendy92 7y ago
      We already do provision clusters, using the aforementioned tools. There is some setup involved, but once done, provisioning and upgrade is relatively simple. Indeed, we used to exclusively provision and upgrade via Terraform/Ansible. When we started using GCP, any data that could be stored by a US company without causing compliance issues was offloaded to GCP over other providers due to the auto provisioning/management at no cost. If you guys find it hard to maintain/upgrade clusters, that's your business. All I am saying is that as a company giving you business, with this change, you are now no longer the cheapest, most reliable or most convenient. As a result, we will be moving to provision instances with other providers from now on.
- oxfordmale 7y ago
  No, the $73 was a selling point of GCP. You could easily spin up different clusters at no additional costs (at least for the cluster itself).
thockingoog 7y ago
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 happen. We have a large team of people who deal with making GKE the industry-leading Kubernetes experience that it is. They are on-call and active in every stage of the GKE product lifecycle, adding value that you maybe can't see every day, but I promise you is there. When things go sideways, there isn't a better team on the planet to field the tickets. 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. For those people who use a large numbers of small clusters, I understand this may make you reconsider how you operate. As a Kubernetes maintainer, I WANT to say that a smaller number of larger clusters is generally a better answer. I know it's not always true, but I want to help make it true. GKE goes beyond pure k8s here, too. Things like NodePools and sandboxes give you even more robust control GKE is the best managed Kubernetes you can get. And we're always making it better. Those clusters actually DO have overhead for Google, and as we make GKE better, that overhead tends to go up. As someone NOT involved in this decision, it seems reasonable to me that things which are genuinely valuable have a price. Also, keep in mind that a single (zonal) cluster is free, which covers a notable fraction of people using GKE.
- nojvek 7y ago
  The problem is you are charging more without providing a clear case that the value is worth it. It looks like a bad deal from an existing customers view point. 73/month is not a lot, but it’s still turning back on the original value proposition. If it’s such a small amount, absorb the cost as cost of doing business, so you can retain customers better and grow new ones.
- alasdair_ 7y ago
  >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 its own - the issue is (a lack of) customer trust.

sethvargo 7y ago

Thank you for the feedback. > Google's inability to actually commit to long term support... This is _exactly_ what Google is doing in this case. We are providing an SLA - a legal agreement of availability and support. These changes introduce a guaranteed availability of the management control plane.

sladey 7y ago
Shouldn't that be opt-in? The management control plane is not something we consider critical to operations. I'd happily accept if it was unavailable for 1 and a half minutes a day versus these additional costs.
- sethvargo 7y ago
  That's great feedback. I'll relay that to the product team. IANAL, but I think it would be legally challenging.
  - sladey 7y ago
    IANAL either, but I don't see why it would be? Just have a separate cluster type, e.g SLA Zonal, SLA Regional. The SLA already differentiates the current cluster types. Anthos Clusters are also not subject to any additional fees? And having it opt-in will save face with those users of GKE where an additional $73/m is significant.
  - waffle_ss 7y ago
    Hard to understand how it would be legally challenging. ISP's do it all the time when differentiating their business plans from residential. Both services run over the same infrastructure and you typically get the same/similar speeds, but a key difference is an SLA with the business plan.
  - bavell 7y ago
    Opt-in for the SLA and additional cluster cost would be fantastic. We run pretty small clusters but don't need any additional SLA's on top of what's already provided. Frankly we could care less about the control plane SLA.
  - merb 7y ago
    btw. I would prefer to have something like a cost reduce if the cluster runs 24/7. Currently we also do not need that amount of SLA. but we actually have a single cluster and are a really small customer that reall choose GKE, because of no management fee (i.e. nodes are really expensive compared to non cloud providers). But we never used more than one REGIONAL cluster (we also never spun up a new one, we only change workers). And now it will cost us money. What a shame. P.S.: german sites have the pricing wrong.
jerendy92 7y ago
Sure, in this case I can see that. I was referring to those four points with respect to Google services in general. I'm sure I don't need to dig up a list of features and services that have been merged, shuttered, price hiked or moved into a different product suite over the years. Admittedly a lot of the issues are with the GSuite side of things, but it's sad to see this coming to GCP as well. On a hopefully more constructive note, if this is the way it's going to be from now on, I would at least expect to see an exemption on such a management fee/SLA on preemptible nodes - having an SLA and management fee on the cluster whereby nodes can be killed in a 30 second window without prior warning seems to be a little more than pointless.
- sethvargo 7y ago
  Even if your worker nodes are pre-emptible, the master nodes are not. The management fee covers running those master nodes and many other core GCP integrations (like Stackdriver logging and other advanced functionality). Billing is computed on a per-second basis for each cluster. The total amount will be rounded to the nearest penny at the end of the month.
txomon 7y ago
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 enough, they will increase the price. They are the Ryanair of the cloud. Edit 1: moreover, it will increase the cost of composer, and on top of that, the recommended pattern where composer is paired with a kubernetes cluster for executing the workloads
- allendoerfer 7y ago
  > They are the Ryanair of the cloud. Isn't Ryanair literally the Ryanair of the cloud(s)?
- Niksko 7y ago
  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.
  - physicles 7y ago
    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.
- bartread 7y ago
  > Finally, the pricing changes are starting to look like a pattern, every time Google deems the usage of a product is good enough, they will increase the price. To be fair this is hardly new and by no means limited to Google. Any number of SaaS startups that have survived to at least moderate success have done similar things. Look at UserVoice as an example: started out with a free tier plus some reasonable paid tiers with transparent pricing, then a year or two back killed the free tier and moved to a non-transparent "enterprise" pricing model with absolutely exhorbitant fees. Plenty of other companies offer free to build their userbase and reach, then either water down the free tier, or remove it entirely. It's practically the SV modus operandi for the last decade.
notyourday 7y ago
> We are providing an SLA - a legal agreement of availability and support. Do I still have to pay the bill first, fill out forms, get account managers involved, at some point receive a partial credit, and repeat this until the delta between what I was expected as the SLA credit and what I got as the SLA credit is less than the cost of the time to fight for another cycle?

simplecto 7y ago

Never trust free without an escape hatch.

tpetry 7y ago

What? A 73$ price difference to AWS was their main selling point?

jerendy92 7y ago
It depends entirely on how a firm has their infrastructure set up - if you have small cluster(s) per client for isolation/compliance purposes, you end up with, for example with 250 clients, each one using, say, 1000 billable hours/month: 250 * 0.1 * 1000 = $25,000/month. This is quite the price hike for something that was a) free until now. b) Not a service that warrants such a fee given that it uses existing (GCE) resources and can frankly be done manually by one of the DevOps engineers for a few hours/month and some scripting. It's just a charge for convenience it seems.
- sethvargo 7y ago
  You keep noting how "easy" it is to provision and manage a Kubernetes cluster. From experience, properly securing and maintaining a Kubernetes cluster is a multi-person full-time job.
  - jerendy92 7y ago
    We already do provision clusters, using the aforementioned tools. There is some setup involved, but once done, provisioning and upgrade is relatively simple. Indeed, we used to exclusively provision and upgrade via Terraform/Ansible. When we started using GCP, any data that could be stored by a US company without causing compliance issues was offloaded to GCP over other providers due to the auto provisioning/management at no cost. If you guys find it hard to maintain/upgrade clusters, that's your business. All I am saying is that as a company giving you business, with this change, you are now no longer the cheapest, most reliable or most convenient. As a result, we will be moving to provision instances with other providers from now on.
oxfordmale 7y ago
No, the $73 was a selling point of GCP. You could easily spin up different clusters at no additional costs (at least for the cluster itself).

thockingoog 7y ago

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 happen. We have a large team of people who deal with making GKE the industry-leading Kubernetes experience that it is. They are on-call and active in every stage of the GKE product lifecycle, adding value that you maybe can't see every day, but I promise you is there. When things go sideways, there isn't a better team on the planet to field the tickets. 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. For those people who use a large numbers of small clusters, I understand this may make you reconsider how you operate. As a Kubernetes maintainer, I WANT to say that a smaller number of larger clusters is generally a better answer. I know it's not always true, but I want to help make it true. GKE goes beyond pure k8s here, too. Things like NodePools and sandboxes give you even more robust control GKE is the best managed Kubernetes you can get. And we're always making it better. Those clusters actually DO have overhead for Google, and as we make GKE better, that overhead tends to go up. As someone NOT involved in this decision, it seems reasonable to me that things which are genuinely valuable have a price. Also, keep in mind that a single (zonal) cluster is free, which covers a notable fraction of people using GKE.

nojvek 7y ago
The problem is you are charging more without providing a clear case that the value is worth it. It looks like a bad deal from an existing customers view point. 73/month is not a lot, but it’s still turning back on the original value proposition. If it’s such a small amount, absorb the cost as cost of doing business, so you can retain customers better and grow new ones.
alasdair_ 7y ago
>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 its own - the issue is (a lack of) customer trust.