Google is overhauling its pricing for its GKE service and introducing a management charge for clusters, sparking outrage amongst its customers.

The search, ads, cloud, whatever giant yesterday announced that: “Starting June 6, 2020, GKE clusters will accrue a management fee of $0.10 per cluster per hour, irrespective of cluster size or topology.”

In apparent sweetener, it added, “One zonal cluster per billing account is free. GKE cluster management fees do not apply to Anthos GKE clusters.”

AWS has been charging a per cluster fee of, wait for it, $0.10 per hour since January. Before that, it charged $0.20 per hour. 

As of today, it seems Microsoft doesn’t charge a cluster management fee for its Azure Kubernetes Service.

At the same time, Google said it would also introduce an SLA  “that’s financially backed with a guaranteed availability of 99.95% for regional clusters and 99.5% for zonal clusters running a version of GKE available through the Stable release channel.”

The SLA demonstrates “our commitment to superior performance” Google said.

A Google spokesperson added, “This allows our team to remain focused on product innovation, while more closely aligning with industry pricing standards. Customers and developers can continue to experiment with GKE through our free zonal cluster.”

Kubernetes was spawned out of Google, and observers have suggested that GCP’s expertise with the container orchestrator was a major attraction for potential customers – along with the fact that as third place in the cloud race, it had to work that little bit harder on pricing and service.

The change didn’t go down well with (potential?) customers, who generally voiced their dismay on Twitter, though there were voices suggesting that for most organisations doing Kubernetes at anything like scale, the costs were little more than a rounding error.