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agoell

After this, I've been exploring other places to host our team's clusters... copied pricing below

- EKS: $0.10/hour/cluster

- Digital Ocean: Free (only charges for the nodes)

- Azure: Free (only charges for the nodes)

In the long run we'll probably try and build our stack on vendor-agnostic tools..

- Rancher - https://rancher.com/products/rancher/

- Infra.app - https://infra.app (mentioned a few weeks back on the Kubernetes podcast)

- Prometheus https://prometheus.io/ - metrics

The cloud providers all include their own tooling (logging, monitoring) built-in but I'm worried this will only lock us on to further price increases.. has anyone found a good vendor-neutral logging system? We don't really want to use ELK stack right now since it's really heavy and costly to run...

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OVH also offer a free control plane, but their service is relatively beta so far.

We've been running our own cluster on EC2 nodes built with kops and it's worked well so far. As for logging, which part of ELK is heavy? You can use the cloud operator to run it from within your cluster (https://www.elastic.co/elastic-cloud-kubernetes). We've also switched to https://vector.dev as a more lightweight alternative to filebeat/logstash.

One more shameless plug for my startup, https://kubesail.com (YCS19)!

Shameless plug: https://www.kubermatic.io Disclaimer: I work at Loodse (the company behind kubermatic)

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22487110

Honestly I understand the hard work it takes to manage all the clusters, but this was a total bait and switch and hurts the reputation that everyone has with Google Cloud. Telling us to DIY because we cannot pay $71 just sounds like someone who works at Google would say, which you do work at Google.

The sentiment with my clients before was that Google Cloud was a great choice because of the security and expertise with GKE. It's also free!

Meanwhile, in the back of my head I've always had this fear because of your reputation that you do not keep your promises and that you do not care about your users. Because of this fear, we have tried to make every infrastructure decision not use a managed service by Google even though it may be easier to do so short-term.

For the product I'm working on, we decided to use Kubernetes just in case you baited and switched us with the reputation you have. In terms of monitoring, we really wanted to use Stackdriver, but now we're 100% using fluent-bit + prometheus + loki + grafana. It's the only way to protect ourselves from your reputation which is becoming a reality.

So yeah, this is pretty sad and a bad decision. Should have priced GKE at $70 / month to begin with and we would have been fine with it. Now we're (actually) looking at EKS since Amazon doesn't seem to have this reputation and you've spooked us. We never would have thought about using any other provider until today.

I understand the emotional response here, but I don't think it's rational. GKE has to work as a business, or else the whole thing is in trouble.

I think GKE provides tons of value, but people tend to under-estmate that. In order to keep providing that value, we need to make sure it is sustainable.

I'm really, truly sad that you perceive it as bait-and-switch, but I disagree with that characterization. If you want to move off GKE, I'll go out of my way to help you, but I urge you to take a big-picture look at the TCO.

I think part of the optic's issues is your peers seem to be offering similar services for free, while being sustainable.

EKS has always had a fee.

AKS, well, I don't have any insight into their business, but I have my suspicions.

This kind of mentality is why Google is struggling. You forget that your customers are human and make emotion-driven decisions. This price increase proves that you are not making sustainable long-term decision and you are willing to dump the cost of that mistake on your customers.

We already don't trust Google to provide long-term, stable, reliable infrastructure and each time something like this happens, we become more convinced that Google isn't trustworthy.

To be fair, it's unusual for a product at this scale to go from free to paid. It's also unusual for it to happen to a product which already went from paid to free once before.

I don't agree with the parent that it's a bait-and-switch, but I also don't think what's happening is an emotional response. For many people and companies, clusters being free have been a feature of Google Cloud. Making it a paid feature completely changes the dynamic.

It's an unexpected announcement that will further sour sentiment about Google as a company. It's really hard to build trust in this industry, and it's really easy lose it. Google has this thing about announcing changes that blow up negatively on HN, and could learn from this.

(For the record, I'm a big fan of Kubernetes, and I like GKE a lot.)

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