You're thinking like a human. There are plenty of organizations where $5/mo and $150/mo are essentially indistinguishable and would not affect decision making in any way.
As an individual this may look expensive, but as a company this is much cheaper than paying the loan of a developer.
Disclaimer: I work at GCP, but not on GKE.
I don't know about you, but I'd personally rather pay the $5 if I don't need a serious cluster yet. How much in actual absolute dollars do you think this is going to cost you, just in order to figure out exactly how it works, and what other AWS widgets you'll also need to pay for in order to use it effectively?
I am a human, basically looking for a stepping stone on some actual cloud to land on that is comparable to Minikube, and this sure isn't it.
Amazon has made a substantial investment in Kubernetes here and that is nothing to shrug at. They are entitled (and justified) to recoup it. It's fair to say that K8S is not for lightweights, too.
AWS provides a fairly generous free tier and they are also justified to extract some payment from every user of their services that derives some non-negligible value. If you're using Kubernetes and you're not getting any value out of it, I think it's also fair to say that you're doing it wrong.
It's just pointless for small users to argue about AWS costs. The service is not meant for them and it cannot fulfill their requirements.
I absolutely agree with everything you said, if you only added "at this time" to the end of that last sentence.
The service is too expensive and too complicated to be used by very small companies or individual users. There are also more appropriate competitors in that space.
It is exactly as you say, companies that don't want to spend more than they absolutely need to on infrastructure. Shaving pennies to save money. We are each too small to make any significant money on us, taken individually. That's what makes us the long tail.
Do you think in 6 months, you will be able to get a non-HA Kubernetes master on Amazon's free tier? Almost surely within 12 months. At that time, they will have addressed the long tail. Today's announcement is not for us. It's for large enterprise customers that settled on Kubernetes (and 57% of Kubernetes is already on AWS, so many of them are likely not new customers.) We're both right, from opposite perspectives.
It doesn't mean that they bring any significant revenues or that the distribution follows a long tail. I would actually bet that amateur users are not forming a long tail.
I don't think my needs are that unique.
By the way, startups get $100k free credits on each of the major clouds.
(Why save a few dollars when you can get extra capacity instead? Especially when you have $100k of someone else's money to burn... so, for real though, anyone who has actually tried this configuration can chime in and confirm that it works as well as I imagine.)
I'm pretty sure that periodically shutting down some nodes is a boon for cluster utilization, too. One of the things that Kubernetes does not do on its own, is load rebalancing. You can configure the autoscaler to recognize when nodes are overprovisioned, and let it drain a few and shut them down... or you can let the preemptible nature of (some/all of your) nodes do it for you.
(Why not both? Some nodes are getting killed, or you're paying for resources you don't use, so... one way or another.)
I got introduced to the Kubernetes ecosystem when Deis Workflow was rebuilt for it. Today, I'm a core contributor on the team that is building the fork of that project.
(It is a side thing for me. I'm very interested but I'm not spending hundreds on infrastructure every month. I have an infrastructure team at $dayJob, and they are not doing K8S at all, if you are having a hard time understanding how exactly I got here.)
This is great cost cutting measure for services where loosing some percentage of compute only induces lag vs taking down the whole service.
It sounds like you must have taken some investment to qualify. But I believe my friend received the credit, and I have no idea if his business has received any investments or participates in any accelerator program.
It is a program (several different programs actually), you apply for it. This looks like a good place to start.[2]
If you don't think you qualify after reading that, might be worth talking to Arun Gupta anyway. He is the Principal Open Source Technologist. He was all over the Reddit thread answering questions about EKS today.[3] Super classy.
It looks like they offer $1000-$100000 depending on how fast you want to spend it and what stage you're at.[4] "AWS Activate - Portfolio Plus" is the program talked about, that offers $100k credit that expires in a year. If you don't qualify for that, you probably qualify for either the $1000 or the $15000.
[1]: https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-get-100-000-credit-on-Amazon...
[2]: https://aws.amazon.com/startups/
[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/8osr8c/amazon_eks_is_n...
$144/month is nothing if it means someone else can manage some of the parts of Kubernetes.