> Google's inability to actually commit to long term support...
This is _exactly_ what Google is doing in this case. We are providing an SLA - a legal agreement of availability and support. These changes introduce a guaranteed availability of the management control plane.
As someone else noted, it breaks a lot of recommended architectures where you would have auto provisioning and a lot of clusters to separate concerns and keep costs down.
Finally, the pricing changes are starting to look like a pattern, every time Google deems the usage of a product is good enough, they will increase the price.
They are the Ryanair of the cloud.
Edit 1: moreover, it will increase the cost of composer, and on top of that, the recommended pattern where composer is paired with a kubernetes cluster for executing the workloads
Isn't Ryanair literally the Ryanair of the cloud(s)?
Two and a half 9’s is a whole different story. We achieved about 20 hours of downtime last year even without HA on k8s bare metal in Alibaba cloud. But I’m uncertain whether that’s a feat we can repeat this year.
To be fair this is hardly new and by no means limited to Google. Any number of SaaS startups that have survived to at least moderate success have done similar things.
Look at UserVoice as an example: started out with a free tier plus some reasonable paid tiers with transparent pricing, then a year or two back killed the free tier and moved to a non-transparent "enterprise" pricing model with absolutely exhorbitant fees.
Plenty of other companies offer free to build their userbase and reach, then either water down the free tier, or remove it entirely. It's practically the SV modus operandi for the last decade.
Google is not a startup, it is one of the largest companies on the planet.
And having it opt-in will save face with those users of GKE where an additional $73/m is significant.
P.S.: german sites have the pricing wrong.
On a hopefully more constructive note, if this is the way it's going to be from now on, I would at least expect to see an exemption on such a management fee/SLA on preemptible nodes - having an SLA and management fee on the cluster whereby nodes can be killed in a 30 second window without prior warning seems to be a little more than pointless.
Do I still have to pay the bill first, fill out forms, get account managers involved, at some point receive a partial credit, and repeat this until the delta between what I was expected as the SLA credit and what I got as the SLA credit is less than the cost of the time to fight for another cycle?