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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, esp

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.

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.