Our cloud service here at confluent is designed around giving customers their own infrastructure. A lot of the times, that means giving them their own k8s cluster. The management overhead there isn't the issue however.

The real issue comes into play when you try to make developer environments.

To give our developers any semblance of a "real production-like" workload, they need to work with an entire kubernetes cluster - maybe even a couple - to simulate what's happening in production.

This means at any given time, we have hundreds of GKE clusters because each developer needs a place to try things. Yes, these are ephemeral and can be tossed aside, and yes they cost a tiny bit in VM prices, but adding a per-cluster management fee is going to skyrocket this expense and push us towards trying to figure out ways to share these clusters between developers, which defeats the entire purpose of the project.

We'll have to seriously consider abandoning GKE for this use-case now and that sucks, because it's by far the fastest managed k8s solution we've found so far.