On June 6, 2020, your Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters will start accruing a management fee, with an exemption for all Anthos GKE clusters and one free zonal cluster. ...
I was utterly disappointed when I received this email last night. It introduces additional $75 per month per cluster. Apparently, I wasn't the only one who felt this way, folks at HackerNews were furious. Some of them were willing to migrate their entire stack off GCP and others would even go to extremes of rolling out their own DIY cluster. However, after going through the thread, I think this fee is fairly justifiable.
I discovered people were creating tons of small clusters purely for isolation purposes without realizing the additional overhead that it implies. This fee will be a slap on the wrist (or face in my case) and will encourage teams to create larger clusters instead and use proper isolations at namespace level; perhaps injuntiction with Istio and gVisor.
This new pricing will match it’s AWS counterpart, EKS, which already charges $0.1 per hour per cluster. Given the maturity and feature sets on GKE far outweighs EKS, it is not completely unreasonable. Plus, there’s one free cluster exempted from this fee, per account.
In the thread, I noticed people tend to get irrational when they’re upset and feel powerless. Instead of fixing their existing architecture they would rather do something completely irrational. Weirdly enough, I could relate them. I think we sometimes tend resist change under the false clause of stability. Clearly, I’m guilty of this too; something for me to reflect on.
Also I discovered a gem on multi-tenancy on GKE, hidden deep in the thread.