Hey everyone - Seth from Google here. Please let us know if you have any questions! You can learn more about the pricing changes at https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/pricing.
Thanks for being the recipient of everyone's (justifiable) frustrations. They probably don't pay you enough.
I think, what is especially frustrating about this, is that we do already pay for resources that are provisioned by our K8S clusters. We pay for the network traffic, the storage, the compute. I saw you mention StackDriver... we pay for that as well.
I can appreciate that actually setting up and managing GKE backplanes is a non-trivial expense, but I generally assumed that that cost was amortized out, just like I don't pay for the backplane that runs GCE and the rest of GCP's service suite.
I also appreciate that you mention some customers are perhaps taking advantage of this "free" resource. But, isn't that quotas are for?
Frankly, more concerning than the fact that now I have a new $73/mo. fee attached to my account (which, is not the end of the world) is that this really comes out of left field, and in the context of concerns about the the nature of GCP's new leadership, and reports of Google leadership debating GCP as a going concern. I realize a lot of that isn't well founded, but it's surprises like this one that keep that narrative alive. AWS ain't no saint, but they are pretty consistently who they are: not full of bad surprises.
This just leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and makes me wonder if I can expect other surprising cost increases, or perhaps, if these don't "work", worse surprises like deprecation notices. Is this the precursor to you all discontinuing GKE because, as the DevRel class likes to tweet, nobody should be using Kubernetes if they can use (more expensive) services like Cloud Run?
Are we about to get Oracled?
Can confirm :)
> ...we do already pay for resources that are provisioned by our K8S clusters
Customers are charged for worker nodes, but until this point, the control plane ("master") nodes have been free. In addition to the raw compute costs for those nodes, there's the SRE overhead for managing, upgrading, and securing them.
> ...but I generally assumed that that cost was amortized out
<googlehat>I'm not really sure.</googlehat> <civilian>My guess would be that, initially, this was the case. However, over time, people have created many zero-node clusters. Now the amortization isn't. Again, pure speculation.</civilian>
> But, isn't that quotas are for?
See my comment above about zero-node clusters.
> I have a new $73/mo. fee attached to my account (which, is not the end of the world) is that this really comes out of left field...
Acknowledge, but I do want to highlight that changes take place a few months from now (June 2020), not immediately. Furthermore, each billing account gets one zonal cluster with no management fee.
> Is this the precursor to you all discontinuing GKE because, as the DevRel class likes to tweet, nobody should be using Kubernetes if they can use (more expensive) services like Cloud Run?
100% no. Also, Cloud Run is almost always cheaper than running a Kubernetes cluster.
> Are we about to get Oracled?
I'm not sure what you mean by that verb.
> In addition to the raw compute costs for those nodes, there's the SRE overhead for managing, upgrading, and securing them.
By that logic, can we expect to see charges for GCP Projects and the GCP Console? Cloud IAM?
> people have created many zero-node clusters
I'd be really curious what is driving folks to do that. Are they using the backplane for CRDs and custom controllers and no compute?
This feels like it could be addressed similar to alpha clusters, or with a quota, e.g.: clusters with 0 nodes for > 24 hours will be terminated?
Separately, It seems like handing everyone 3 months to figure out what to do about a new $73 * X fee isn't the best plan. Including some kind of estimate in the emails that were sent out would have been helpful. There was a change in pricing for StackDriver a while back that did this. It was very helpful to understand how we would be impacted.
> Furthermore, each billing account gets one zonal cluster with no management fee.
My feedback is that you would probably get getting way less blowback if that free-tier didn't come across as inadequate. I can appreciate that there are use-cases where it makes sense for you all to be charging. But one zonal cluster... It makes the whole thing feel punitive.
> I'm not sure what you mean by that verb.
I have a feeling we're all about to go on a journey of discovery together.
I was one of those people. I got an email from Google this morning and thought "that's weird. I didn't even know I was running a Kubernetes cluster." I think I created it years ago to work through a Kubernetes tutorial and, since it was free, never bothered to delete it.
So, I can imagine this being a problem. Though it seems like having a minimum hourly charge per cluster would have been a better way to handle this (i.e. if your cluster is using less than $0.10/hr in resources, you get charged the difference).
I may be missing something here, but my guess is that a lot of people turn to GKE to learn how to use K8s, and then are like "wait, I'm in the middle of this project/tutorial/etc., but I don't want to be billed overnight when it's literally just going to be doing nothing, what do I do?" and find Stack Overflow or something recommending you just scale it to zero. See questions like this: https://serverfault.com/questions/877619/turn-off-a-cluster-...
This seems like a really important detail. For hobby projects, one cluster in one zone should be enough. Per your statement, those people will not be impacted. With this knowledge, I'm experiencing much less FUD.
> I'm not sure what you mean by that verb.
The CEO of Google Cloud is the former President of Product Development at Oracle Corporation. Oracle Corporation has a reputation for being incredibly hostile to their customers, which includes things like "finding creative new ways to charge our customers more money. I mean, what are they going to do, switch to Postgres? lol"
I think the fundamental problem is that Google Cloud's reputation is irreparably harmed by Google's overall reputation among developers. Treating this like a tactical or technical problem ("our solution is the best and cheapest!") is missing the forest for the trees.
This is what I'm worried about, because it's the second time this year that GCP started charging for something that was previously included. Back in January they started charging $2.92 per month for in-use IP addresses.
The IP charge might be justifiable because of IPv4 scarcity (although their major competitors still include IPs), but with today's announcement coming just a couple months later, I'm worried they're going to start nickel-and-diming us. I'll be skeptical of any new GCP services that are advertised as having no extra cost.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am part of a small company which has separated our deployment into a number of sub projects, some of which are: dev, staging, production, ci, etc.
The difference for us will be several hundred dollars per month, and that will make an actual (negative) difference for us. We didn't need a "financially backed SLA" before and we don't need it now.
You asked for a question and here it is: Why isn't a financially backed SLA a part of a billing negotiation? I mean, there are some really cool features in "Anthos" but I am not picking up a phone to find out how much that is going to cost.
If a really useful feature like "Cloud Run for GKE" is awkwardly placed in the "Anthos" box, then why isn't the SLA part of "Anthos" too?
Free clusters was a huge part of why we selected GCP. If this SLA nonsense isn't made optional, our next project is not landing on GCP.
I know you are just the messenger here, and I send my sincere sympathies that you have to work with a product manager there that can't compute strategic impact of this change :)
I believe the community is keen to engage with you on this based on the comments in this thread. If your team would like to talk to a disappointment (very small but hoping to grow) customer I'd be happy to jump on a call. I hope others here would be happy to do the same.
Edit: Additional comments: You could limit the number of nodes in the always-free-tier clusters. Above n nodes the free tier clusters aren't free.
With the new pricing, I can't choose to use GKE instead of app engine/cloud run and get the same availability without having to pay for both the nodes and the new control plane cost. Those managed products run over multiple zones in a region. It's disappointing that even just one multi-zone cluster is charged.
With the new pricing, I can't choose to use GKE instead of app engine/cloudrun and get the same availability (by this I mean multiple zones) without having to pay for both the nodes and the new control plane cost. Those managed products run over multiple zones in a region. It's disappointing that even just one multi-zone cluster is charged. I'd be very happy to see you include at least a single multi-zone cluster control plane in the free tier.
To be clear, it's not my team. I'm relaying feedback, but I can't make any guarantees or promises.
All this feedback is super valid and important, and it's being synthesized to the product team.
Seems weird, given that GKE is basically the main reason people seem to use Google Cloud. These kinds of users aren't big fish, but I suspect a lot of them are going to run.
I'd like to share some feedback that echoes that of other commentators, from a different perspective.
I run a local cloud developer community with regional pull for attendees, as well as working directly with local early-stage startups looking to become cloud-native.
GCP has always been my go-to for recommendation for our attendees (mix of developers and technical founders, and some enterprise technology folks) given the affordability factor, pathways to additional credits to flesh out ideas, learn new technologies, or stretch the limited runway of their new organization, and ultimately my belief that GCP is one of, if not the best, clouds for developers given the investment in documentation and engagement DevRel channels.
With the rollback of open-enrollment into a smaller plan of Google Cloud for Startups, and price changes like this, I'm fearing I've chosen the wrong hill to die on when talking with these new customers.
I appreciate the inclusion of a free regional cluster per account, which will still afford myself the opportunity to demonstrate k8s at meetups and to end users without taking more of an out-of-pocket hit, and for folks to learn on their own or maintain hobbyist projects on the same budgets they are accustomed to.
My fear with this announcement is that the negative repercussions of this will not be felt on the bottom line or figures that it seems more and more is the priority of the Google Cloud leaders. Rather, it will be felt hardest by the smaller customers; the hobbyist developer or technical co-founder looking to learn new technologies, to scale up their operations, and who at least in my experience, are driving growth in the mindspace around GCP in their communities.
Put another way, moves like this will further tarnish the reputation of Google for those who the sales engineers have for the last two years, promoted heavily no cluster management fees like "the other guys," and in the eyes of many starting out in these areas (of which I recognize most will never become the big customers that satisfy the requirements of executives).
I hope that when the dust settles, this does not lead to a retraction of what makes Google Cloud great in my mind, which is specifically to developer experience and outreach.
With that in said, I would suggest really driving home this change through dismissable in-console communication at the point of cluster creation, on the dashboard, and in email communication to folks who this will impact, with a clear picture of the impact on them. No one wants another large disruption of thousands of small organizations and users, as was the case with the Google Maps pricing change.
Personally, I'd love to see it increased to one free regional or zonal cluster per account for the remainder of 2020, and then making only one zonal free per account effective 2021. Given the uncertainty around engineer capacity and scheduling given the ongoing human malware crisis affecting companies large and small, I think this could be a good middle ground to satisfy most customers affected by these changes, while still achieving the objective of moving this away from being a loss leader of sorts.