Yep, that's true. Capacity planning and reserving capacity should be taken care by the Cloud provider and users should be free to spin up and down the resources as and when they need them.
This is still the case, but I don't see the harm in offering the ability to reserve an instance for a discount. I prefer GCE's automatically applied discounts to AWS's reserved scheme, but there are plenty of cases where you will need both flexible capacity and have predicted use.
> I don't see the harm in offering the ability to reserve an instance for a discount.
There is no harm with the discount. The harm is only with lock in. Once you reserve instances, you can not change the type (different CPU / memory ratio), region or the number of instances. Once you reserve, you have to pay for your instances 24x7, whether you use it or not. If you require more capacity than reserved, you need to pay the full rate. If you require less capacity, then you need to pay for the unused capacity. You don't have all these headaches with Google Cloud pay per go and automatic discounts. You simply use as many resources as you want and you get the discounts automatically.
k8s master, or any number of internal tools.