Very disappointed. Not by the price increase per se... but by the lack of a reasonable 'always free tier'. I think you should strongly consider tweaking the pricing to provide one or two or three multi-zone clusters for free instead of one single-zone cluster. Let us see the power of GKE without the extra charge and grow on your platform. This would allow new companies to choose gcp over aws/azure and start out with a proper highly available cluster or two/three in different regions and grow to more clusters over time. With the new pricing you're forcing them to choose between a single zone cluster or $70 per month per cluster (or another cloud). Please consider tweaking the new pricing to enable a lower price ramp up for newer companies... why not offer three multi-zone same-region cluster for free and then charge more established enterprises using more than 3 clusters? I appreciate the money is in the big customers... but why scare away the small customers who want 1-3 highly available clusters behind a gclb to provide higher availability and lower global latency. The mindshare of developers will move away from gke if you're not careful... both to aws/azure and others like DO kubernetes.
I believe the community is keen to engage with you on this based on the comments in this thread. If your team would like to talk to a disappointment (very small but hoping to grow) customer I'd be happy to jump on a call. I hope others here would be happy to do the same.
It's a good program. I'm currently in the stage one step before that program. Would your team consider tweaking the pricing as I mentioned, with the goal of helping early stage startups choose GCP? GKE/kubernetes is increasingly not just for big enterprise. Personally I find GKE as easy as app engine or cloud run but much more future proof and more flexible/powerful... the real heart of a GCP to rival AWS. Just this week I set up Config Connector to provision a global load balancer and other GCP resources used by two clusters. An always free tier of two or three (ideally multi zone clusters) would I think go a long way to earn the trust and belief of many devs and early stage startups. As would coming back in the next few days with tweaked pricing based on community feedback.
Edit: Additional comments:
You could limit the number of nodes in the always-free-tier clusters. Above n nodes the free tier clusters aren't free.
With the new pricing, I can't choose to use GKE instead of app engine/cloud run and get the same availability without having to pay for both the nodes and the new control plane cost. Those managed products run over multiple zones in a region. It's disappointing that even just one multi-zone cluster is charged.
Additional comments:
You could limit the number of nodes in the always-free-tier clusters. Above n nodes the free tier clusters aren't free.
With the new pricing, I can't choose to use GKE instead of app engine/cloudrun and get the same availability (by this I mean multiple zones) without having to pay for both the nodes and the new control plane cost. Those managed products run over multiple zones in a region. It's disappointing that even just one multi-zone cluster is charged. I'd be very happy to see you include at least a single multi-zone cluster control plane in the free tier.
I believe the community is keen to engage with you on this based on the comments in this thread. If your team would like to talk to a disappointment (very small but hoping to grow) customer I'd be happy to jump on a call. I hope others here would be happy to do the same.