[thockingoog]

If the main value of GKE over DIY is $73, you should totally DIY.

I mostly try not to be too Google-focused here, but I have to say...

I'm pretty proud of GKE, and I think it offers a lot of value other than just being cheap. Managing clusters is not always easy. GKE handles all of that for you - including integrations, qualifications, upgrades, and patching clusters transparently BEFORE public security disclosures happen.

We have a large team of people who deal with making GKE the industry-leading Kubernetes experience that it is. They are on-call and active in every stage of the GKE product lifecycle, adding value that you maybe can't see every day, but I promise you is there. When things go sideways, there isn't a better team on the planet to field the tickets.

I don't understand the anger here - you're literally saying you'd rather pay more for a service of lower quality because... why? Because they will continue to charge you more? Does not compute.

For those people who use a large numbers of small clusters, I understand this may make you reconsider how you operate. As a Kubernetes maintainer, I WANT to say that a smaller number of larger clusters is generally a better answer. I know it's not always true, but I want to help make it true. GKE goes beyond pure k8s here, too. Things like NodePools and sandboxes give you even more robust control

GKE is the best managed Kubernetes you can get. And we're always making it better. Those clusters actually DO have overhead for Google, and as we make GKE better, that overhead tends to go up. As someone NOT involved in this decision, it seems reasonable to me that things which are genuinely valuable have a price.

Also, keep in mind that a single (zonal) cluster is free, which covers a notable fraction of people using GKE.

[je42]

I believe everything that you say. The value it provides is very good.

If Google Cloud would have charged 73$ from the start (or after beta), i think there wouldn't be so much anger.

The anger comes from, a product was free and now it is not. A lot of people made architectural choices that depended on the price of 0. (You mentioned these cases in your post).

However, i believe the bigger issue is, that Google Cloud broke essentially a promise.

As a customer I need to be able to trust my cloud provider, because I am literally helpless without it.

Can I trust an entity that breaks promises ? No, I can't. I need to worry. Especially, if I cannot follow the reasoning behind it.

If it is true, that Google's overhead went up, because of improvements, then it would have better to have two kinds of clusters (better and paid, old-school and free). You would have not broken the promise. People can choose on their own pace to upgrade if they need to.

Also keep in mind, that you also carry the Google brand. Hence, if other teams of Google break promises (like f.e. Stadia) this will also reflect on the Google Cloud team. Unless you keep a crystal clear track record, i need to assume it can get worse than what you have done right now.

My conclusion is that, I will design the cloud architecture I am responsible for, such that it has minimal dependencies on Google Cloud specifics.

[runeks]

> However, i believe the bigger issue is, that Google Cloud broke essentially a promise.

Which promise?

[solatic]

> I don't understand the anger here - you're literally saying you'd rather pay more for a service of lower quality because... why? Because they will continue to charge you more? Does not compute.

This response, right here, is everything you need to understand about why Google Cloud is failing to sell to the enterprise market.

The enterprise market only really cares about one thing: rock solid stability. It doesn't care about features, and it doesn't (really) care about price. It wants a product that it can forget is there.

What's really sad is, technically, GKE is that product. It just works. It is solid. You do get to forget that it's there. Until you get a random email telling you that you get to explain to your boss that your bill is going up next month and your project might end up running over budget as a result.

If you can understand why a large segment of the market prefers to pay a higher but stable charge over a lower but undependable charge, then you can understand why Google Cloud is failing at selling to enterprise.

[Aeolun]

In addition, AWS charges only ever go down. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a price increase.

[atombender]

Just a data point:

I'm the CTO at a very small company. All our stuff is running on GKE. Our monthly bill tends is a lot less than $10,000/mo. We're currently in the process of splitting our stack into separate projects and clusters, because co-locating projects in a single cluster has gotten messy. We'll probably end up with 4-5. That will increase our bill by $292/mo, worst case, assuming the first cluster is free. For a company our size, it's not a huge expense. But these things add up.

Since moving from DigitalOcean, our Google Cloud setup has more than doubled our monthly bill. We're paying for more compute, but certainly not twice the amount, as we've only gone from 14-15 nodes to around 20; it's just more expensive across the board, both node cost and ingress/egress. We're even cost-cutting by using self-hosted services instead of Google's; for example, we use Postgres instead of Cloud SQL. I ran the numbers earlier today; the equivalent on Cloud SQL would be 3.4 times more expensive.

In short, Google Cloud is expensive, and it's not like the bill is getting smaller over time.

Developments like these factor in my choice of cloud provider for future projects.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Not sure what size a "very small company" size is, but I'm just curious as to why you chose GKE. I make tech decisions for a (probably) much smaller company, and I found things like App Engine Flexible Environment, Cloud Run and Cloud Functions let me do much of the stuff I can do with k8s but with much, much less complexity (at least on my side of things). The main factor is that I don't have a full-time infrastructure expert, and my experience in the past is that k8s essentially requires that.

[TheFiend7]

For sure, though I will say if you're trying to cut costs, it's my understanding serverless is quite cheap. So if you can turn some of your services into serverless containers/functions. I'd highly recommend it.

[echelon]

How much would it cost for you to provision and colocate your own hardware, run a k8s cluster, and manage upgrades?

You might not be at the scale where this is feasible yet since that's probably multiple full-time engineers, but eventually the cost functions intersect.

[sah2ed]

> I don't understand the anger here ... Does not compute.

The saying: “the market’s perception is your reality”, is especially apt here. Google’s decision makers tends to forget that in the end they are dealing with human customers not machines. Contrary to the concept of economic rationality, humans are notorious for exhibiting behavior that, to the untrained eye, appear irrational.

A commenter helpfully explained their perception of the new pricing change:

“The anger comes from, a product was free and now it is not. A lot of people made architectural choices that depended on the price of 0. (You mentioned these cases in your post). However, i believe the bigger issue is, that Google Cloud broke essentially a promise.”

IOW, from their perspective, the pricing change was framed as a loss [1] which opened up a host of negative emotions (anger, mistrust, etc) that come with mitigating a loss that is imminent.

Google as an engineering company may look down on fields like psychology or behavioral econs, but if they genuinely want a fighting chance against AWS and Azure, they will need to court sales leaders with a strong humanities tinge, to avoid these kinds of decision-making that achieve the opposite intended effect — eroding people’s trust in GCP.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion

[alasdair_]

>If the main value of GKE over DIY is $73, you should totally DIY.

It's not the fee itself, it's the worry that GKE will do what Google Maps did and massively increase fees with very little notice, causing people to scramble to migrate.

Google has a really bad reputation right now when it comes to cancelling projects that people have built their businesses upon, or jacking up fees quickly. The $73 is irrelevant on its own - the issue is (a lack of) customer trust.

[thockingoog]

Google and Google Cloud are largely different businesses, though I understand it's hard to keep that in mind in the context of things like this.

I encourage everyone to always stay nimble and keep your eyes on portability. I also encourage you to try to assess the REAL costs of doing things yourself. It's rarely as cheap as you think it is.

As a Kubernetes maintainer, I am fanatical about portability.

As part of the GKE team, I think we provide tremendous value that people tend to under-estimate.

NOTE: I was NOT involved in this decision, but I understand it, and I want to help other people understand it.

[throwaway_5726]

It's not about whether it's worth it. I have no idea if $73/mo/cluster is more or less than what GKE is worth, but you can't ignore the time-varying aspect of this change. If GCP had started at $100/mo and just announced a price drop to $73/mo, your customers would probably be cheering, even though you'd be charging them the same! They'd be happy about being loyal to you, thankful that your offering gets better over time without asking, etc.

Let me put it another way. Lunch perks at Google are probably worth way more than $73/mo. Googlers would probably not feel too great about having to start paying that amount... Even though it's also worth it, people working hard to prepare food, etc.

It happens time and time again that GCP paints itself in a corner with an unsustainable offering and finds itself in a situation where it has to dent customer trust by hiking prices or retiring products on short notice.

Why?

GCP is in no position to pull this off, competitively. Now doesn't seem like the time to pull unit margins up. Google could do so on ads or with Maps API because it has the best product by far in those areas. But not in Cloud, a market where stability is a feature, and GCP is a late, small player against larger competitors who are giving customers a much more stable product.

It doesn't matter if GKE is the best thing since sliced bread, and keeps getting better — as the CTO of a cloud-based business, you have to decide whether you want to build on it over the long run and take the risk of it becoming super expensive over time; there's not a lot of reassurance that this is even a concern at Google at this point.

[toyg]

> Now doesn't seem like the time to pull unit margins up.

Tbf, you don't have the data to say that. Maybe GCP hit the growth targets they had and are not interested in growing more; maybe they've grown so much that service quality is going down; maybe they want to stall and build up other parts of the offer... there are a lot of reasons why they might want to cash in. Whether they could have foreseen it happening at this specific point in time, and how they managed the communication, is another matter. As others said, Google is saddled by default with a perception of commercial unreliability among the tech-savvy, so any new service they launch should factor that issue in terms of long-term optics.

[dehrmann]

> If the main value of GKE over DIY is $73, you should totally DIY.

I'm with you here, and the price feels about right (looking at GCE prices)--it doesn't feel like it's a ripoff or someone's trying to squeeze out more revenue.

> I don't understand the anger here

This is Google being Google. The fee probably makes sense, but as flawed humans, we're subject to the endowment effect and feel like Google's taking something from us. Amazon's all about this customer. This move is all about accurately pricing services, and it's Google putting correctness before emotions.

[polskibus]

Shouldn't the investment in Kubernetes bring its running cost down instead of increasing it?

[nojvek]

The problem is you are charging more without providing a clear case that the value is worth it. It looks like a bad deal from an existing customers view point.

73/month is not a lot, but it’s still turning back on the original value proposition. If it’s such a small amount, absorb the cost as cost of doing business, so you can retain customers better and grow new ones.

[zzzcpan]

> As a Kubernetes maintainer, I WANT to say that a smaller number of larger clusters is generally a better answer.

I'm not trying to nitpick here, but that justification is awful. It goes against reliability engineering on a deeply fundamental level, pretty much guarantees to make already not that reliable things even less reliable. Generally the more isolated entities you have and the smaller they are the less they affect each other and the environment when something bad happens, the faster they can be recovered, the fewer end users they affect, etc. If I remember correctly, this is even how some Kubernetes people justified ideas behind Kubernetes itself that you want to drop now.

[thockingoog]

That is not absolute truth. If it were you would eschew kubernetes altogether and just use VMs.

Everything is a tradeoff. If you want total isolation, you pay for it. If you don't want to pay for it, you make more value-based tradeoffs.

Concretely, Google runs "a handful" of "pretty reliable" services on a relatively small number of clusters.