[txomon]

He means that there was a sales pitch from all gcp sales guys to not charge for that. 99.95% is not enough IMO to charge 73$/mo.

As someone else noted, it breaks a lot of recommended architectures where you would have auto provisioning and a lot of clusters to separate concerns and keep costs down.

Finally, the pricing changes are starting to look like a pattern, every time Google deems the usage of a product is good enough, they will increase the price.

They are the Ryanair of the cloud.

Edit 1: moreover, it will increase the cost of composer, and on top of that, the recommended pattern where composer is paired with a kubernetes cluster for executing the workloads

[allendoerfer]

> They are the Ryanair of the cloud.

Isn't Ryanair literally the Ryanair of the cloud(s)?

[Niksko]

EKS only gives you 99.9% uptime, and I'm uncertain as to whether you could achieve more than 99.9% uptime on your own by DIYing your cluster in a public cloud provider without doing multi-region.

[physicles]

To put that in perspective, three 9’s allows you about 9 hours of downtime a year, which will certainly require multi-region and a dedicated ops team.

Two and a half 9’s is a whole different story. We achieved about 20 hours of downtime last year even without HA on k8s bare metal in Alibaba cloud. But I’m uncertain whether that’s a feat we can repeat this year.

[bartread]

> Finally, the pricing changes are starting to look like a pattern, every time Google deems the usage of a product is good enough, they will increase the price.

To be fair this is hardly new and by no means limited to Google. Any number of SaaS startups that have survived to at least moderate success have done similar things.

Look at UserVoice as an example: started out with a free tier plus some reasonable paid tiers with transparent pricing, then a year or two back killed the free tier and moved to a non-transparent "enterprise" pricing model with absolutely exhorbitant fees.

Plenty of other companies offer free to build their userbase and reach, then either water down the free tier, or remove it entirely. It's practically the SV modus operandi for the last decade.

[marcinzm]

>Any number of SaaS startups that have survived to at least moderate success have done similar things.

Google is not a startup, it is one of the largest companies on the planet.

[bartread]

I don't see how that's relevant: my point is that it's a tactic employed by a wide range of businesses including but not limited to startups and we shouldn't be surprised to see it here. It's not a pattern that has suddenly emerged.