Google really wants you to try out its managed Kubernetes service. In driving that point home, the company has eliminated the cluster management fee for its Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), regardless of the number of clusters being managed.
Aparna Sinha, group product manager, Google, in a blog post said the company would no longer charge the $0.15 per hour fee to manage a cluster with more than six nodes. “At Google, we’ve found that larger clusters are more efficient — especially when running multiple workloads,” she wrote. “So if you were hesitating to create larger clusters, worry no more and scale freely.”
The managed GKE service includes the master VM with automatic scaling, upgrading, back up, and security. Customers can also elect for automatic repairs, upgrades, and scaling of their entire cluster.
Customers are still charged for each node in a cluster based on its resource size and length of use on a per-second basis with a one minute minimum usage cost.
Sinha also noted that Google is offering a preview for a cluster management feature that provisions the type of node in an autoscaling cluster based on the observed behaviour of the workload.
