[thockingoog]

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.

[atombender]

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.)

[solidasparagus]

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.

[ohyeshedid]

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

[thockingoog]

EKS has always had a fee.

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