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Comment by high_5 | Hacker News Reader

IMO the Kubernetes is a "open source bait and switch" business model.

1. Let the potential customers run it for free 2. Wait for them to break their teeth on it. 3. Offer them GKE. 4. Profit!!!

To me the whole situation about k8s is that people are running at it like lemming over the cliff: "Yes, k8s is complex and complicated (even as SaaS!!!), but it's still great!" As an "operator" this just goes beyond my comprehension of what good software looks like.

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GKE is free.

GKE is the managed version of Kubernetes that Google Cloud offers. Definitely not free.

Free as in you pay for your worker nodes, but nothing additional for operating the platform itself. You do lose control over your control plane nodes and etcd however.

Yes, it’s free as long as you pay for it.

No, there is no extra charge for gke. You pay for the nodes you use and you pay the same price whether you are using just cloud compute or whether you run those same cloud compute nodes in a gke.

Mhmm, it's free if you pay for the all other stuff.

Like everywhere else ...

> Free as in you pay for your worker nodes, but nothing additional for operating the platform itself.

If you go to the GCP pricing calculator[0] and add one n1-standard-1 VM to GCE, it costs $24.27/month.

Add one n1-standard-1 VM to a GKE cluster and you pay $38.27/month. There is a literal line item saying "Kubernetes Engine Cost: USD 14.00".

It's not free. It's just billed under the worker.

[0] https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/

If you choose the standard engine edition, there is no additional Kubernetes Engine Cost.

I don't follow you.

Edit: ah, I see my mistake. There's a dropdown that lists "Advanced", which apparently accounts for the $14 difference.

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