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