[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.

[jjoonathan]

If you brand it as "Google," you can't expect the positive associations to transfer and the negative associations not to transfer. That's not how it works. You get both or you get neither.

Keep in mind that you aren't selling to me, you are selling to middle management who hears "it's different we promise" and then goes home to have nightmares about their rival manager piling on: "GCP canceled a service from under you? Who could possibly have seen that coming? Oh, the salesman told you it wouldn't happen, my mistake. (Everyone laughs at manager's stupidity.)"

GCP needs to give these guys ammunition. AWS burns goodwill like they've got a city to light: surprise bills, abandoned (but technically not canceled) services, poor performance, sticky abstractions, shameless grand announcements of services that upon further investigation only exist in the sense that you can ask support and wait 5 days (rDNS), etc. Broken software and subtle (or overt!) killer caveats abound. Go with AWS, we scale to the moon! Oh, "the moon" is >5GB of data through our time series ML? Lol no. Hard limit. Oh, we let your buddies exceed that limit and we're advertising that you can exceed the limit? Lol -- not our problem. Yet nobody holds them accountable. Nobody gets fired for choosing AWS, because AWS over-promising and under-delivering is not a meme. It's reality, especially by Google standards, so GCP marketing could make it a meme if they had any sense about them, but as far as I can tell they aren't interested.

If GCP stays the course, the results are 100% predictable and frustrating as hell, because AWS is a real steaming pile and I hate to see them continue to win The Game because Google, of all companies, can't figure out how to advertise and manage their reputation.

[Aeolun]

Google and Google Cloud are not largely different businesses to the world at large. That may be true internally, but what you do reflects on the other.

Aside from that, Google has a reputation for pulling this shit, and now Google Cloud does too.

The value you provide is irrelevant to how you make people feel with decisions like this.

[GKE_Greed]

sorry that you have to work with such low-IQ people that made this decision. Followed your work on k8s, thank you, its better because of people like you and others.

[thockingoog]

I don't think that is at all a fair characterization, you just don't have the same data available to you.

Thanks for the props. It means a lot to me personally.