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This 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 t

This 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, three-control-planes decision is not reversible - I cannot in fact shut two of those down without shutting down my production cluster and starting a new one. https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/types-of-clusters https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/typ... Awful. Just so awful. Edit: To answer some questions below - we have a single-tenant model where we run an instance of our async discussion tool (https://aether.app https://aether.app) per customer for better isolation, that’s why we had bought into Kubernetes / GCP. Since we have our own hypervisor inside the clusters, it makes me wonder whether we can just deploy multiple hypervisors into the same cluster, or remove the Kubernetes dependency and run this on a Docker runtime in a more classical environment.

_pmf_ 7y ago
> I took a bet on the underdog by using GCP That's a concerning take on business decisions on two levels.
Fiahil 7y ago
> I don’t think GCP is fully aware of their position in the market as the second, inferior choice. I'm sorry, but first choice is AWS, second is Azure (mostly because retailers don't like AWS), and third is actually GCP.
simiones 7y ago
> I don’t think GCP is fully aware of their position in the market as the second, inferior choice Aren't they the third choice, after AWS and Azure?
Kassius509 7y ago
Come on over to AWS. https://aws.amazon.com/activate/ https://aws.amazon.com/activate/
tmpz22 7y ago
Too many people drank the cloud kool-aid. The move from day one was to create provider agnostic cloud architectures and repent the use of provider-specific services. That said they do make it damn hard. Our k8s cluster is as basic as it comes, no databases, simple deployments, but we do still have a dependency on Google Cloud Loadbalancer (which we hate). If pricing goes up too much from this we'll move, but the GCL dependency will be a PITA :/
- rolleiflex 7y ago
  We’re in the same situation — we’ve engineered for minimum provider-specific dependencies but GKE LoadBalancers were where they got us via arm twisting as well. There is no way to expose a cluster to the outside world in a production environment otherwise.
  - tmpz22 7y ago
    Do you also have occasional outages because the load balancer gets into a confused state and changes take 10+ minutes to propagate with no re-course other then than to destroy and re-create the entire resource?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - lvh 7y ago
    It's kind of ridiculous internal load balancers can't get automatic certs. We've had to do a stupid dance just to get certs via the LE DNS challenge out of band, and then regularly install them on internal LBs.
    - tmpz22 7y ago
      Same! I still manually provision some certificates just because LEGO/etc. just don't work with GCP + Google Cloud Load balancer! And the docs for the entire subject are useless..
    - 7y ago
bloblaw 7y ago
GCP is actually more the 3rd inferior option, behind Azure. Gartner lists Azure as just behind AWS for IaaS providers, and GCP a more distant 3rd: https://pages.awscloud.com/Gartner-Magic-Quadrant-for-Infrastructure-as-a-Service-Worldwide.html https://pages.awscloud.com/Gartner-Magic-Quadrant-for-Infras...
- ygggvg 7y ago
  Gcp is not gke. In my opinion the gke offering fromg gcp is the best right now.
  - transect 7y ago
    I agree. Though I will say that IAP and gsuite groups backed IAM is nice.
  - fernandotakai 7y ago
    i kind of agree, after trying AKS, EKS and GKE. GKE blows everyone out of the water.
- lvh 7y ago
  Anecdotal, I know, but for prospective Latacora customers this is absolutely not reflected in market share. It's AWS first, GCP second, Azure very distant third. I'd happily believe Azure is dominating in some segments where MS showers prospective customers with millions of dollars in credit, but IMO a blind person can see Azure does not have the product offering to warrant a "completeness of vision" that is right on the heels of AWS.
  - sl1ck731 7y ago
    Anecdotally and in my opinion, Azure is more complete than GCP. Between stuff like this and their product dropping stigma, most of my customers (in the cloud consulting space) are trying to get into Azure. This is across every industry we work in (retail especially). I've come across 2 customers in 3 years of consulting that want anything to do with GCP.
lvh 7y ago
For what it's worth, we're seeing a GKE being the main reason prospective clients use GCP at Latacora, to a point where I'd say I was surprised if someone was on GCP but _not_ using GKE. Obviously that's a small subset of all companies, but GKE does seem like the goose that lays the golden eggs for them, at least insofar they care about startup market share. I also think of them as the second, inferior cloud, but they're almost certainly the better k8s hoster. If you're serious about running k8s on AWS, there's a good chance you're doing something like CloudPosse's Terraform-based setup, not EKS.
- hunta2097 7y ago
  I've used both extensively, GKE is superior to EKS in every way... Except on cost it now seems.
sethvargo 7y ago
Thank you for the feedback. The management fee is per cluster. You are not billed for replicated control planes. You can use the pricing calculator at https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator#tab=container https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator#tab=container to model pricing, but it should work out to $73/mo regardless of nodes or cluster size (again, because it's charged per-cluster). There's also one completely free zonal cluster for hobbyist projects.
- rolleiflex 7y ago
  Seth — I appreciate you being here to take feedback, and for the clarification as well. The very surprising email I’ve received this morning is very hazy on the details, and the docs linked from the email are not updated yet. The main issue is that not charging for the control plane and charging for the control plane leads to two very different Kubernetes architectures, and as per your docs, those decisions made at the start are very much set in stone. You cannot change your cluster from a regional cluster to a single zone cluster for example. So you have customers who built their stacks taking into account your free control plane, and you’re turning the screws in by adding a cost for it — but they cannot change the type of their cluster to optimise their spend, since, per your docs, those decisions are set in stone. That’s entrapment. You should keep existing clusters in the pricing model they’ve been built in, and apply this change for clusters created after today. That said, many of us made a bet on GCP. For us in particular, we made a bet to the point that our SQL servers are on AWS, but we still switched to GCP for ‘better’ Kubernetes and for not nickel and diming, since AWS had a charge that looked like it was designed to convey that they’d much rather have you use their own stuff than Kubernetes. It is a relatively trivial amount, but it makes a world of difference in how it feels and you guys know more than anyone how much of these GCP vs AWS decisions are made based not on data sheets but for the ‘general feel’ for the lack of a better word. AWS’ message is that they’re the staid, sort of old fashioned, but reliable business partner. GCP’s message, as of this morning, is stop using GCP.
  - andrewmutz 7y ago
    If this cost bothers you a great deal, why not just deploy a new cluster?
ygggvg 7y ago
It's 72$ not 300 and the first is free. I'm not sure what your usecase is that you would choose gke and you are worried about 300$ per month infra costs. For Corp we use gke. For private I use selfhostet k3samd for our startup asuper cheap digital ocean cluster.
- maest 7y ago
  > worried about 300$ per month infra costs That feels like the wrong attitude.
  - bluhbi 7y ago
    The salary of people working and using those 'tools' this infrastructure is higher then 300$. If your kubernetes cluster is part of your core infrastructure, then 300$ more or less should not be an issue at all (not to say that i think 300$ is nothing). That should not mean that you should waste money but often enough, if you buy cheap and your hardware breaks and your time&material costs much more then what a better hardware would have cost, then you wasted money by buying cheap. Unfortunate with IT products, there are certain things which are not directly visible: Like how secure is your product. GCP offers 2FA, Digital Ocean does not. How much money is it worth to you to have your whole infrastructure protected by 2FA? For me in a business context, non 2FA would be a no go.
    - jorams 7y ago
      > GCP offers 2FA, Digital Ocean does not. Digital Ocean definitely supports 2FA[1] [1]: https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/accounts/security/2fa/ https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/accounts/security/2fa/
      - ygggvg 7y ago
        Indeed. I did not see it in my account but those limitations are still a nogo.
- diegoperini 7y ago
geerlingguy 7y ago
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 work projects) this effectively means you're going to pay as much for GKE cluster control planes than you do for EKS.
- sethvargo 7y ago
  Can you help me understand how these changes would be _more_ than EKS?
  - geerlingguy 7y ago
    Sorry, misread the original post, it would be the same.
- bogomipz 7y ago
  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-for-kubernetes-on-aws/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/cost-optimization-fo...
  - geerlingguy 7y ago
    EKS is $0.10/hour
    - bogomipz 7y ago
      From my link above: >"The EKS control plane is the easiest to understand with a fixed cost of $0.20 per hour."
      - 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
taleodor 7y ago
My approach with any Google b2b product - always have a plan to migrate out of Google and never agree to anything that locks you to Google. After seeing what they did to Google Maps and Api.AI / Dialogueflow jumped from free to 5k$ overnight - just can't trust them.
- tmpz22 7y ago
  There is a whole generation of future CTO / VP of Engineering types who are coming up on these reputations for GCP, AWS, Azure, etc. and it'll be interesting to see how the biases play out over the next 5-10 years. I predict a strong move back to self-hosting once the pains of i.e. self-managing a bare metal K8s cluster come down, as well as storage/ram/cpu prices continuing to drop. I for one welcome it. There is a billion dollar company on the horizon for whoever can best commoditize bare metal with an apple-esque usability model.
  - enos_feedler 7y ago
    Maybe Apple does it? They are good at building apple-esque usability models and are business aligned to sell metal.
- riyadparvez 7y ago
  > never agree to anything that locks you to Google. How is Google different from other cloud poviders in terms of vendor lock-in?
  - taleodor 7y ago
    Fair point - yes, I kind of try to avoid it for any provider. But special thing about Google is they are raising prices or worse cancelling or modifying services at will. For AWS or Azure I developed way more trust over time - could be subjective - but also could be that there is a reason Google is distant 3rd in the game.
  - notyourday 7y ago
    Being locked into a provider that does not increase prices or modify services in a non-compatible way ( cancel etc ) works much better than being locked into a provider that does.
endymi0n 7y ago
Interesting. As a mid level GCP customer, it won't make a big dent on our bill specifically, but in the end, I'm not sure this pricing move is a smart strategy. With this fixed fee model, the change will barely make a difference (== Google revenue) for the large customers who can spare the money, but will create a significant entry barrier to that side project / super-early stage that considers getting hooked on GCP, specifically GKE. Then again, not my decision to make.
- bluhbi 7y ago
  Thats for me the most frustrating thing with GCP, AWS and Azure. I would never use them as a very early small 3 people startup or for private reasons. There is no billing protection (which could make you very poor very fast) and every service has a certain cost and quality which is just not feasable in the beginning. Even GKE with its free kubernetes master does block a lot of resources on the nodes: https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/cluster-architecture#node_allocatable https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/clu... Also a ton of great features on gke you will probably never use if you are too small. It is so much cheaper to just get cheap hardware somewhere and put your own k8s onto it if you have more time then money. Even on Digital Ocean you have the load balancer problem: you need to use the provided and also 'costly' LoadBalancer service. There is only one hacky way to prevent it by exposing your ingress on the host and mapping that one ip but then you loose all the self healing stuff and loadbalancing capability.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    If I’m running a startup trying to develop a product with limited staff, the last thing I want to be worried about is the “undifferentiated heavy lifting”. I want to be concentrating on what is going to add business value. Then again, I know enough about AWS and how to control my cost.
  - fosk 7y ago
    > you loose all the self healing stuff and loadbalancing capability. I mean, yes? You can either build your own for “free”, or pay for the value-add features DO provides that you have described. I don’t see where the problem is.
darau1 7y ago
> their position in the market as the second, inferior choice Who's the superior choice? EKS?
- snisarenko 7y ago
  I've been using digital ocean k8 cluster. It's been pretty good. (a few kinks with configuring load balancers, but other than that its good).
- jrockway 7y ago
  EKS feels like a product where Jeff Bezos walked into a room and said "you're all fired if you don't have a Kubersomethings service up in the next two weeks". The team did it and haven't touched it since. The amount of management they make you do is amazing. Need to upgrade the kernel on your nodes? Fill out a five page CloudFormation workflow, and if you copy-pasted anything wrong, your cluster will just randomly work strangely for no reason. This is what they consider "fully managed"! (There are also lots of neat bugs, like if you create a cluster in the web interface while logged in with SSO, all credentials necessary to access the cluster will disappear in an hour. By design, apparently. So even though they have a web interface, you have to create a role account and use the command-line.) It's really a wondrous product and shows how complacent you can be when you're in first place.
  - darau1 7y ago
    Okay, so what's the best option? It can't be them lol
whatsmyusername 7y ago
It's considerably cheaper than EKS. Looks like $75-80 a month vs I believe around $200 per EKS cluster. Everyone's having EKS cost problems while I'm just sitting over here paying nothing for ECS control planes.
- ones_and_zeros 7y ago
  It's the same price as EKS... https://aws.amazon.com/eks/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/eks/pricing/
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- maishsk 7y ago
  I am not sure how you get to $200/month for an EKS cluster - it is $0.1/hr https://aws.amazon.com/eks/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/eks/pricing/
  - whatsmyusername 7y ago
    I might be thinking of the numbers I put together for dev/stage/prod. Turned out to be irrelevant. Following their instructions I couldn't get EC2 runtime hosts to attach after a couple hours of fucking around (which is my standard for, 'is this mature enough to use'), while with ECS I hit one button and was up an running. Wasn't a hard choice when we started dockerizing (especially since I could simplify most jobs even further having dev use Fargate, albeit at a premium). EKS struck me as a feature parity product, not something you'd actually use.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
For obvious reasons, this anecdote reminds me of the adage that one of the things you have to watch out for when saving someone from drowning, is that their flailing about will put your own life in danger.
dastx 7y ago
For comparison, running a HA master node in London on n1-standard-1 will set you back ~93 dollars per month. On top of that obviously you'd be figuring out how Kubernetes works, what the best configuration is among other things. I don't agree with the blatant bait and switch, but it still works out way better.
dhsuieeh 7y ago
Dumb plan, underdogs don't have billion dollar connections. Worse plan because Google has a reputation for bad service.
buzzkillington 7y ago
The projects I've been on that used GCP over AWS fell into two categories. 1). CEO with delusions of grandeur who thought that Amazon was a direct competitor to their business and should not be given money. 2). Projects that used Kubernetes. Two is the only type of project which doesn't result in tens of millions of dollars wasted.
- dralley 7y ago
  > 1). CEO with delusions of grandeur who thought that Amazon was a direct competitor to their business and should not be given money. I mean, look at Netflix.
  - redis_mlc 7y ago
    Netflix chose AWS because it was the only viable cloud at the time. (They used Azure for backups.) In fact, Netflix helped build AWS. There were daily long-term scheduled meetings with AWS developers to review new features and versions. In addition, the policy from mgmt. was that they were fine being mono-cloud, since if they changed their mind, they had the engineering resources to migrate whenever it made sense. Source: worked at Netflix.
trilinearnz 7y ago
Who would be the first choice: Amazon or Microsoft?
- snisarenko 7y ago
  Give digital ocean k8 cluster a try. It's been pretty decent for me
- eatmyshorts 7y ago
  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.
yoshiat 7y ago
Thank you for your feedback and we understand this was a surprise to you and many. For cluster per customer architecture, would you be able to look into https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/best-practices/enterprise-multitenancy https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/best-practic... to see if there is anything useful? We understand changing the architecture isn't easy at all and we'd love to know how we can help.
- andybak 7y ago
  I'm curious whether you're comfortable with this move or not. Something about your tone gives the impression you think this was a strategic error.
  - yoshiat 7y ago
    thockingoog's responses below articulates my feeling very well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22487726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22487726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22487110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22487110 What I can do is to lower the bar for aggregating clusters with the investments we've done so far. Hope that makes sense.
tobyhede 7y ago
GCP is not second, but third behind Azure.
hitpointdrew 7y ago
> I don’t think GCP is fully aware of their position in the market as the second, inferior choice. They are 3rd for me, I will take AWS or Azure long before I would take GCP. Hell for some projects I would even take Digital Ocean or Linode over GCP.
gumby 7y ago
> I don’t think GCP is fully aware of their position in the market as the second, inferior choice. That's because they are aware of their position as a distant fourth place. They just (well last quarter) allocated an additional $2 billion to try and get a foothold in the enterprise, shook up the management team, and is on a spending spree as well. Because google search is so shitty I couldn't find the $2B announcement (though it was on HN at the time) but here's a recent article on the general subject https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/02/27/google-buying-way-cloud-computing-cornerstone.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/02/27/google-buying-way-...

_pmf_ 7y ago

> I took a bet on the underdog by using GCP That's a concerning take on business decisions on two levels.

Fiahil 7y ago

> I don’t think GCP is fully aware of their position in the market as the second, inferior choice. I'm sorry, but first choice is AWS, second is Azure (mostly because retailers don't like AWS), and third is actually GCP.

simiones 7y ago

> I don’t think GCP is fully aware of their position in the market as the second, inferior choice Aren't they the third choice, after AWS and Azure?

Kassius509 7y ago

Come on over to AWS. https://aws.amazon.com/activate/ https://aws.amazon.com/activate/

tmpz22 7y ago

Too many people drank the cloud kool-aid. The move from day one was to create provider agnostic cloud architectures and repent the use of provider-specific services. That said they do make it damn hard. Our k8s cluster is as basic as it comes, no databases, simple deployments, but we do still have a dependency on Google Cloud Loadbalancer (which we hate). If pricing goes up too much from this we'll move, but the GCL dependency will be a PITA :/

rolleiflex 7y ago
We’re in the same situation — we’ve engineered for minimum provider-specific dependencies but GKE LoadBalancers were where they got us via arm twisting as well. There is no way to expose a cluster to the outside world in a production environment otherwise.
- tmpz22 7y ago
  Do you also have occasional outages because the load balancer gets into a confused state and changes take 10+ minutes to propagate with no re-course other then than to destroy and re-create the entire resource?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- lvh 7y ago
  It's kind of ridiculous internal load balancers can't get automatic certs. We've had to do a stupid dance just to get certs via the LE DNS challenge out of band, and then regularly install them on internal LBs.
  - tmpz22 7y ago
    Same! I still manually provision some certificates just because LEGO/etc. just don't work with GCP + Google Cloud Load balancer! And the docs for the entire subject are useless..
  - 7y ago

bloblaw 7y ago

GCP is actually more the 3rd inferior option, behind Azure. Gartner lists Azure as just behind AWS for IaaS providers, and GCP a more distant 3rd: https://pages.awscloud.com/Gartner-Magic-Quadrant-for-Infrastructure-as-a-Service-Worldwide.html https://pages.awscloud.com/Gartner-Magic-Quadrant-for-Infras...

ygggvg 7y ago
Gcp is not gke. In my opinion the gke offering fromg gcp is the best right now.
- transect 7y ago
  I agree. Though I will say that IAP and gsuite groups backed IAM is nice.
- fernandotakai 7y ago
  i kind of agree, after trying AKS, EKS and GKE. GKE blows everyone out of the water.
lvh 7y ago
Anecdotal, I know, but for prospective Latacora customers this is absolutely not reflected in market share. It's AWS first, GCP second, Azure very distant third. I'd happily believe Azure is dominating in some segments where MS showers prospective customers with millions of dollars in credit, but IMO a blind person can see Azure does not have the product offering to warrant a "completeness of vision" that is right on the heels of AWS.
- sl1ck731 7y ago
  Anecdotally and in my opinion, Azure is more complete than GCP. Between stuff like this and their product dropping stigma, most of my customers (in the cloud consulting space) are trying to get into Azure. This is across every industry we work in (retail especially). I've come across 2 customers in 3 years of consulting that want anything to do with GCP.

lvh 7y ago

For what it's worth, we're seeing a GKE being the main reason prospective clients use GCP at Latacora, to a point where I'd say I was surprised if someone was on GCP but _not_ using GKE. Obviously that's a small subset of all companies, but GKE does seem like the goose that lays the golden eggs for them, at least insofar they care about startup market share. I also think of them as the second, inferior cloud, but they're almost certainly the better k8s hoster. If you're serious about running k8s on AWS, there's a good chance you're doing something like CloudPosse's Terraform-based setup, not EKS.

hunta2097 7y ago
I've used both extensively, GKE is superior to EKS in every way... Except on cost it now seems.

sethvargo 7y ago

Thank you for the feedback. The management fee is per cluster. You are not billed for replicated control planes. You can use the pricing calculator at https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator#tab=container https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator#tab=container to model pricing, but it should work out to $73/mo regardless of nodes or cluster size (again, because it's charged per-cluster). There's also one completely free zonal cluster for hobbyist projects.

rolleiflex 7y ago
Seth — I appreciate you being here to take feedback, and for the clarification as well. The very surprising email I’ve received this morning is very hazy on the details, and the docs linked from the email are not updated yet. The main issue is that not charging for the control plane and charging for the control plane leads to two very different Kubernetes architectures, and as per your docs, those decisions made at the start are very much set in stone. You cannot change your cluster from a regional cluster to a single zone cluster for example. So you have customers who built their stacks taking into account your free control plane, and you’re turning the screws in by adding a cost for it — but they cannot change the type of their cluster to optimise their spend, since, per your docs, those decisions are set in stone. That’s entrapment. You should keep existing clusters in the pricing model they’ve been built in, and apply this change for clusters created after today. That said, many of us made a bet on GCP. For us in particular, we made a bet to the point that our SQL servers are on AWS, but we still switched to GCP for ‘better’ Kubernetes and for not nickel and diming, since AWS had a charge that looked like it was designed to convey that they’d much rather have you use their own stuff than Kubernetes. It is a relatively trivial amount, but it makes a world of difference in how it feels and you guys know more than anyone how much of these GCP vs AWS decisions are made based not on data sheets but for the ‘general feel’ for the lack of a better word. AWS’ message is that they’re the staid, sort of old fashioned, but reliable business partner. GCP’s message, as of this morning, is stop using GCP.
- andrewmutz 7y ago
  If this cost bothers you a great deal, why not just deploy a new cluster?

ygggvg 7y ago

It's 72$ not 300 and the first is free. I'm not sure what your usecase is that you would choose gke and you are worried about 300$ per month infra costs. For Corp we use gke. For private I use selfhostet k3samd for our startup asuper cheap digital ocean cluster.

maest 7y ago
> worried about 300$ per month infra costs That feels like the wrong attitude.
- bluhbi 7y ago
  The salary of people working and using those 'tools' this infrastructure is higher then 300$. If your kubernetes cluster is part of your core infrastructure, then 300$ more or less should not be an issue at all (not to say that i think 300$ is nothing). That should not mean that you should waste money but often enough, if you buy cheap and your hardware breaks and your time&material costs much more then what a better hardware would have cost, then you wasted money by buying cheap. Unfortunate with IT products, there are certain things which are not directly visible: Like how secure is your product. GCP offers 2FA, Digital Ocean does not. How much money is it worth to you to have your whole infrastructure protected by 2FA? For me in a business context, non 2FA would be a no go.
  - jorams 7y ago
    > GCP offers 2FA, Digital Ocean does not. Digital Ocean definitely supports 2FA[1] [1]: https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/accounts/security/2fa/ https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/accounts/security/2fa/
    - ygggvg 7y ago
      Indeed. I did not see it in my account but those limitations are still a nogo.
diegoperini 7y ago

geerlingguy 7y ago

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 work projects) this effectively means you're going to pay as much for GKE cluster control planes than you do for EKS.

sethvargo 7y ago
Can you help me understand how these changes would be _more_ than EKS?
- geerlingguy 7y ago
  Sorry, misread the original post, it would be the same.
bogomipz 7y ago
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-for-kubernetes-on-aws/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/cost-optimization-fo...
- geerlingguy 7y ago
  EKS is $0.10/hour
  - bogomipz 7y ago
    From my link above: >"The EKS control plane is the easiest to understand with a fixed cost of $0.20 per hour."
    - 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

taleodor 7y ago

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.

tmpz22 7y ago
There is a whole generation of future CTO / VP of Engineering types who are coming up on these reputations for GCP, AWS, Azure, etc. and it'll be interesting to see how the biases play out over the next 5-10 years. I predict a strong move back to self-hosting once the pains of i.e. self-managing a bare metal K8s cluster come down, as well as storage/ram/cpu prices continuing to drop. I for one welcome it. There is a billion dollar company on the horizon for whoever can best commoditize bare metal with an apple-esque usability model.
- enos_feedler 7y ago
  Maybe Apple does it? They are good at building apple-esque usability models and are business aligned to sell metal.
riyadparvez 7y ago
> never agree to anything that locks you to Google. How is Google different from other cloud poviders in terms of vendor lock-in?
- taleodor 7y ago
  Fair point - yes, I kind of try to avoid it for any provider. But special thing about Google is they are raising prices or worse cancelling or modifying services at will. For AWS or Azure I developed way more trust over time - could be subjective - but also could be that there is a reason Google is distant 3rd in the game.
- notyourday 7y ago
  Being locked into a provider that does not increase prices or modify services in a non-compatible way ( cancel etc ) works much better than being locked into a provider that does.

endymi0n 7y ago

Interesting. As a mid level GCP customer, it won't make a big dent on our bill specifically, but in the end, I'm not sure this pricing move is a smart strategy. With this fixed fee model, the change will barely make a difference (== Google revenue) for the large customers who can spare the money, but will create a significant entry barrier to that side project / super-early stage that considers getting hooked on GCP, specifically GKE. Then again, not my decision to make.

bluhbi 7y ago
Thats for me the most frustrating thing with GCP, AWS and Azure. I would never use them as a very early small 3 people startup or for private reasons. There is no billing protection (which could make you very poor very fast) and every service has a certain cost and quality which is just not feasable in the beginning. Even GKE with its free kubernetes master does block a lot of resources on the nodes: https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/cluster-architecture#node_allocatable https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/clu... Also a ton of great features on gke you will probably never use if you are too small. It is so much cheaper to just get cheap hardware somewhere and put your own k8s onto it if you have more time then money. Even on Digital Ocean you have the load balancer problem: you need to use the provided and also 'costly' LoadBalancer service. There is only one hacky way to prevent it by exposing your ingress on the host and mapping that one ip but then you loose all the self healing stuff and loadbalancing capability.
- scarface74 7y ago
  If I’m running a startup trying to develop a product with limited staff, the last thing I want to be worried about is the “undifferentiated heavy lifting”. I want to be concentrating on what is going to add business value. Then again, I know enough about AWS and how to control my cost.
- fosk 7y ago
  > you loose all the self healing stuff and loadbalancing capability. I mean, yes? You can either build your own for “free”, or pay for the value-add features DO provides that you have described. I don’t see where the problem is.

darau1 7y ago

> their position in the market as the second, inferior choice Who's the superior choice? EKS?

snisarenko 7y ago
I've been using digital ocean k8 cluster. It's been pretty good. (a few kinks with configuring load balancers, but other than that its good).
jrockway 7y ago
EKS feels like a product where Jeff Bezos walked into a room and said "you're all fired if you don't have a Kubersomethings service up in the next two weeks". The team did it and haven't touched it since. The amount of management they make you do is amazing. Need to upgrade the kernel on your nodes? Fill out a five page CloudFormation workflow, and if you copy-pasted anything wrong, your cluster will just randomly work strangely for no reason. This is what they consider "fully managed"! (There are also lots of neat bugs, like if you create a cluster in the web interface while logged in with SSO, all credentials necessary to access the cluster will disappear in an hour. By design, apparently. So even though they have a web interface, you have to create a role account and use the command-line.) It's really a wondrous product and shows how complacent you can be when you're in first place.
- darau1 7y ago
  Okay, so what's the best option? It can't be them lol

whatsmyusername 7y ago

It's considerably cheaper than EKS. Looks like $75-80 a month vs I believe around $200 per EKS cluster. Everyone's having EKS cost problems while I'm just sitting over here paying nothing for ECS control planes.

ones_and_zeros 7y ago
It's the same price as EKS... https://aws.amazon.com/eks/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/eks/pricing/
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
maishsk 7y ago
I am not sure how you get to $200/month for an EKS cluster - it is $0.1/hr https://aws.amazon.com/eks/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/eks/pricing/
- whatsmyusername 7y ago
  I might be thinking of the numbers I put together for dev/stage/prod. Turned out to be irrelevant. Following their instructions I couldn't get EC2 runtime hosts to attach after a couple hours of fucking around (which is my standard for, 'is this mature enough to use'), while with ECS I hit one button and was up an running. Wasn't a hard choice when we started dockerizing (especially since I could simplify most jobs even further having dev use Fargate, albeit at a premium). EKS struck me as a feature parity product, not something you'd actually use.

ChuckMcM 7y ago

For obvious reasons, this anecdote reminds me of the adage that one of the things you have to watch out for when saving someone from drowning, is that their flailing about will put your own life in danger.

dastx 7y ago

For comparison, running a HA master node in London on n1-standard-1 will set you back ~93 dollars per month. On top of that obviously you'd be figuring out how Kubernetes works, what the best configuration is among other things. I don't agree with the blatant bait and switch, but it still works out way better.

dhsuieeh 7y ago

Dumb plan, underdogs don't have billion dollar connections. Worse plan because Google has a reputation for bad service.

buzzkillington 7y ago

The projects I've been on that used GCP over AWS fell into two categories. 1). CEO with delusions of grandeur who thought that Amazon was a direct competitor to their business and should not be given money. 2). Projects that used Kubernetes. Two is the only type of project which doesn't result in tens of millions of dollars wasted.

dralley 7y ago
> 1). CEO with delusions of grandeur who thought that Amazon was a direct competitor to their business and should not be given money. I mean, look at Netflix.
- redis_mlc 7y ago
  Netflix chose AWS because it was the only viable cloud at the time. (They used Azure for backups.) In fact, Netflix helped build AWS. There were daily long-term scheduled meetings with AWS developers to review new features and versions. In addition, the policy from mgmt. was that they were fine being mono-cloud, since if they changed their mind, they had the engineering resources to migrate whenever it made sense. Source: worked at Netflix.

trilinearnz 7y ago

Who would be the first choice: Amazon or Microsoft?

snisarenko 7y ago
Give digital ocean k8 cluster a try. It's been pretty decent for me
eatmyshorts 7y ago
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.

yoshiat 7y ago

Thank you for your feedback and we understand this was a surprise to you and many. For cluster per customer architecture, would you be able to look into https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/best-practices/enterprise-multitenancy https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/best-practic... to see if there is anything useful? We understand changing the architecture isn't easy at all and we'd love to know how we can help.

andybak 7y ago
I'm curious whether you're comfortable with this move or not. Something about your tone gives the impression you think this was a strategic error.
- yoshiat 7y ago
  thockingoog's responses below articulates my feeling very well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22487726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22487726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22487110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22487110 What I can do is to lower the bar for aggregating clusters with the investments we've done so far. Hope that makes sense.

tobyhede 7y ago

GCP is not second, but third behind Azure.

hitpointdrew 7y ago

> I don’t think GCP is fully aware of their position in the market as the second, inferior choice. They are 3rd for me, I will take AWS or Azure long before I would take GCP. Hell for some projects I would even take Digital Ocean or Linode over GCP.

gumby 7y ago

> I don’t think GCP is fully aware of their position in the market as the second, inferior choice. That's because they are aware of their position as a distant fourth place. They just (well last quarter) allocated an additional $2 billion to try and get a foothold in the enterprise, shook up the management team, and is on a spending spree as well. Because google search is so shitty I couldn't find the $2B announcement (though it was on HN at the time) but here's a recent article on the general subject https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/02/27/google-buying-way-cloud-computing-cornerstone.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/02/27/google-buying-way-...