Comment by numbsafari | Hacker News Reader

Comment by numbsafari | Hacker News Reader

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Hey Seth,

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?

> They probably don't pay you enough.

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.

Thank you for the detailed response.

> 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.

If abuse of zero-node clusters is an issue, wouldn't it be better to introduce a zero-node cluster fee the same way you charge for unused reserved IP addresses?

Also, how much resource does a 0-node cluster actually use on the control plane?

> I'd be really curious what is driving folks to do that.

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).

That seems like a really good idea, maybe they should look at doing that? As noted, $73 should be a trivial charge both from Google's perspective and the customer's for an actual cluster.

So couldn't you charge the control-plane for zero-node clusters?

I think the reason a lot of people create zero node clusters is that they want to "turn off" their cluster without destroying its current configuration or state, which otherwise doesn't seem possible.

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-...

> Furthermore, each billing account gets one zonal cluster with no management fee.

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.

>> Are we about to get Oracled?

> 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.

> finding creative new ways to charge our customers more money.

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.

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