Show HN: Free GeoJSON editor to visualize, download or convert into many formats - <AUTHOR> https://geoman.io/ <comment><USER2> This is really slick! It's missing a few key features, like letting me modify some meta details of an object by clicking, or easily deleting an object. I'd also like a way to more easily create a polygon without zooming in really far to put the final point very close to the original point, instead of ending the drawing.

I use [http://geojson.io](http://geojson.io) quite frequently to modify geojson data sets, but there are some annoying bugs especially when working with larger data sets. One key feature they have is being able to swap between multiple tile providers, so you can compare where certain features are positioned on different maps.

I recently started a new Geo meetup here in Tokyo, [https://GeoTokyo.com](https://GeoTokyo.com) \- I'll share at the next event.

Thanks

<comment> m-watson This one is really slick, I wonder how it works with larger data sets. I'll check it out later. Geojson.io is a nice one but I second your comment, anything on the larger side it just crashes for me. I end up just using QGIS with a text editor open for the geojson editing. It ends up being a game of trial and error that gets very tedious.

<comment><USER3> Good point. Performance is a problem on these tools and I need to do some work on that front as well. My email is on geoman.io - send me a data set and let me try. I will make improvements here in the next weeks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems very similar to geojson.io . I'm curious, are you leveraging their source somehow?

<comment><USER3> nope. Not at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks nice! Sexier than geojson.io, but, as others have pointed out, you need to get it up to feature parity before a lot of us would consider using it for serious work.

I'll try it out and send some more feedback your way.

<comment><USER3> will do - it's v1 and we will get there

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I use GeoJSON all the time in mobile robotics. For indoor robotics, we are using our own local coordinate system. This means that we "lie a little bit" about the GeoJSON spec, treating x and y as linear metres in a flat world.

tl;dr: I would love if more tools allowed you to hide the map and just ignore the details of the CRS/Projection. I do so much work on and around Null Island as a result. QGIS has been _very_ good at this. But most online tools always assume use cases are WGS84.

<comment><USER7> Oh, absolutely this! I work on game heatmaps (Halo), player path analysis, etc. Having a flat-world coordinate system with a customer-supplied map is critical.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback, guys... this is awesome!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We aim to provide the best GeoJSON editor out there. Feedback is most welcome!

<comment><USER8> In the editor, I do see Shapefile in the dropdown for downloading. It's unavailable however. (Same for WKT and TopoJSON). Are these paid features?

<comment><USER3> They will come soon. No paid features planned yet but we will see how much effort the tool is for us in the future. For now, most of these formats will be supported for free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love this. It could have been really great to have this about 10 years ago, when I was looking for a quick way to manually partition cities' neighborhoods through GEOjson polygons.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why do you allow users to draw circles when they aren't actually a proper GeoJSON geometry. It's just a Point geometry with a custom (unit-less) radius property.

<comment><USER3> The basis for the editor is my open source drawing plugin for leaflet - Leaflet-Geoman. It supports circles because Leaflet supports circles. GeoJSON is just a format to export Leaflet-Layers - so we made Circles work even though it's custom.

You're definitely right about the unit-less part. Something I should be fixing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Would be good if wkt can also be supported as input

<comment><USER3> thanks, I put it on the list

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is kick ass!

I can think of some incredible use cases I could put to work today!

<comment><USER3> Go ahead :-)</comment></comment>


Send files at up to 1 Gbps and get 400 GB for the trial. Feedback welcomed - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Is it just me, or the link is missing here ?

<comment><USER3> Just you, it works fine on my end.

<comment><USER4> Yeah works perfect on my end as well.</comment></comment></comment>


Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster management fee on June 6 - <AUTHOR> https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/pricing EDIT: Link on Google's Official Documentation here https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/pricing
Just received an email from Google Cloud -
"On June 6, 2020, your Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters will start accruing a management fee, with an exemption for all Anthos GKE clusters and one free zonal cluster.
Starting June 6, 2020, your GKE clusters will accrue a management fee of $0.10 per cluster per hour, irrespective of cluster size and topology.
We're making some changes to the way we offer Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Starting June 6, 2020, your GKE clusters will accrue a management fee of $0.10 per cluster per hour, irrespective of cluster size and topology. We're also introducing a Service Level Agreement (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. Below, you'll find additional details about the new SLA and information to help you reduce your costs." <comment><AUTHOR> Just received an email from Google Cloud -

"On June 6, 2020, your Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters will start accruing a management fee, with an exemption for all Anthos GKE clusters and one free zonal cluster.

Starting June 6, 2020, your GKE clusters will accrue a management fee of $0.10 per cluster per hour, irrespective of cluster size and topology.

We're making some changes to the way we offer Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Starting June 6, 2020, your GKE clusters will accrue a management fee of $0.10 per cluster per hour, irrespective of cluster size and topology. We're also introducing a Service Level Agreement (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. Below, you'll find additional details about the new SLA and information to help you reduce your costs."

</comment><comment><USER3> This is awful - I don't think GCP is fully aware of their position in the market as the second, inferior choice. I took a bet on the underdog by using GCP and they bit me back in return. Especially considering their 'default' kubernetes config automatically sets you up with three(!) control planes in replication, that's, as far as I understand, $~300 added to our monthly bill, for nothing.

Oh, and per their docs, three-control-planes decision is _not_ reversible - <USER2> cannot in fact shut two of those down without shutting down my production cluster and starting a new one. [https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes- engine/docs/concepts/typ...](https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes- engine/docs/concepts/types-of-clusters)

Awful. Just so awful.

Edit: To answer some questions below - we have a single-tenant model where we run an instance of our async discussion tool ([https://aether.app](https://aether.app)) per customer for better isolation, that's why we had bought into Kubernetes / GCP. Since we have our own hypervisor inside the clusters, it makes me wonder whether we can just deploy multiple hypervisors into the same cluster, or remove the Kubernetes dependency and run this on a Docker runtime in a more classical environment.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for the feedback. The management fee is per cluster. You are not billed for replicated control planes. You can use the pricing calculator at [https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator#tab=container](https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator#tab=container) to model pricing, but it should work out to $73/mo regardless of nodes or cluster size (again, because it's charged per-cluster).

There's also one completely free zonal cluster for hobbyist projects.

<comment><USER3> Seth — I appreciate you being here to take feedback, and for the clarification as well. The very surprising email I've received this morning is very hazy on the details, and the docs linked from the email are not updated yet.

The main issue is that _not charging for the control plane_ and _charging for the control plane_ leads to two very different Kubernetes architectures, and as per your docs, those decisions made at the start are very much set in stone. You cannot change your cluster from a regional cluster to a single zone cluster for example. So you have customers who built their stacks taking into account your free control plane, and you're turning the screws in by adding a cost for it — but they cannot change the type of their cluster to optimise their spend, since, per your docs, those decisions are set in stone. That's entrapment.

You should keep existing clusters in the pricing model they've been built in, and apply this change for clusters created after today.

That said, many of us made a bet on GCP. For us in particular, we made a bet to the point that our SQL servers are on AWS, but we still switched to GCP for 'better' Kubernetes and for _not nickel and diming_ , since AWS had a charge that looked like it was designed to convey that they'd much rather have you use their own stuff than Kubernetes. It is a relatively trivial amount, but it makes a world of difference in how it feels and you guys know more than anyone how much of these _GCP vs AWS_ decisions are made based not on data sheets but for the 'general feel' for the lack of a better word.

AWS' message is that they're the staid, sort of old fashioned, but reliable business partner. GCP's message, as of this morning, is _stop using GCP._

<comment><USER4> Thank you <3\. I apologize the email was hazy on details. I can't un-send it, but I'll work with the product teams to make sure they are crystal clear in the future. I'm interested to learn more about what you mean about outdated docs? The documentation I'm seeing appears to have been updated. Can you drop me a screenshot, maybe on Twitter (same username, DMs are open).

These changes won't take effect until June - customers won't start getting billed immediately. I'm sorry that you feel trapped, that's not our intention.

> You should keep existing clusters in the pricing model they've been built > in, and apply this change for clusters created after today.

This is great feedback, but clusters should be treated like cattle, not pets. I'd love to learn more about why your clusters must be so static.

<comment><USER5> > clusters should be treated like cattle, not pets.

Off-topic, but is this really how people do k8s these days? Years ago when I was at Google, each physical datacenter had at most several "clusters", which would have fifty thousand cores and run every job from every team. A single k8s cluster is already a task management system (with a lot of complexity), so what do people gain by having many clusters, other than more complexity?

<comment><USER6> The most common thing I've heard is "blast radius reduction", i.e. the general public are not yet smart enough to run large shared infrastructures. That seems something that should be obviously true.

People had exactly the same experiences with Mesos and OpenStack, but k8s has decent tooling for turning up many clusters, so there is an easy workaround

<comment><USER5> I still feel like that would only work in very niche cases.

I mean, if people aren't smart enough to run a large shared infrastructure, how can I trust them to run a large number of shared clusters, even if each cluster is small. The final scale is still the same.

<comment><USER7> Updating 100 clusters bares less risk than updating a single giant one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Time to dump GCP then. It's not even that the fee is that large, but rather that this is once again Google failing on a long term commitment and shafting those on their platform once again. This was one of the benefits that was pushed by their sales team when they called us up to market GCP over AWS and their EKS offering. Doesn't matter that they are price matching, Google's inability to actually commit to long term support, servicing, pricing or features across any of their products is tiresome. Time to move business elsewhere to AWS or Azure. They may be more expensive, but at least we know what we are paying for, and that it's going to stay that way for a significant length of time.

<comment><USER9> If the main value of GKE over DIY is $73, you should totally DIY.

I mostly try not to be too Google-focused here, but I have to say...

I'm pretty proud of GKE, and I think it offers a lot of value other than just being cheap. Managing clusters is not always easy. GKE handles all of that for you - including integrations, qualifications, upgrades, and patching clusters transparently BEFORE public security disclosures happen.

We have a large team of people who deal with making GKE the industry-leading Kubernetes experience that it is. They are on-call and active in every stage of the GKE product lifecycle, adding value that you maybe can't see every day, but I promise you is there. When things go sideways, there isn't a better team on the planet to field the tickets.

I don't understand the anger here - you're literally saying you'd rather pay more for a service of lower quality because... why? Because they will continue to charge you more? Does not compute.

For those people who use a large numbers of small clusters, I understand this may make you reconsider how you operate. As a Kubernetes maintainer, I WANT to say that a smaller number of larger clusters is generally a better answer. I know it's not always true, but I want to help make it true. GKE goes beyond pure k8s here, too. Things like NodePools and sandboxes give you even more robust control

GKE is the best managed Kubernetes you can get. And we're always making it better. Those clusters actually DO have overhead for Google, and as we make GKE better, that overhead tends to go up. As someone NOT involved in this decision, it seems reasonable to me that things which are genuinely valuable have a price.

Also, keep in mind that a single (zonal) cluster is free, which covers a notable fraction of people using GKE.

<comment><USER10> Just a data point:

I'm the CTO at a very small company. All our stuff is running on GKE. Our monthly bill tends is a lot less than $10,000/mo. We're currently in the process of splitting our stack into separate projects and clusters, because co-locating projects in a single cluster has gotten messy. We'll probably end up with 4-5. That will increase our bill by $292/mo, worst case, assuming the first cluster is free. For a company our size, it's not a huge expense. But _these things add up_.

Since moving from DigitalOcean, our Google Cloud setup has more than doubled our monthly bill. We're paying for more compute, but certainly not twice the amount, as we've only gone from 14-15 nodes to around 20; it's just more expensive across the board, both node cost and ingress/egress. We're even cost-cutting by using self-hosted services instead of Google's; for example, we use Postgres instead of Cloud SQL. I ran the numbers earlier today; the equivalent on Cloud SQL would be 3.4 times more expensive.

In short, Google Cloud is expensive, and it's not like the bill is getting smaller over time.

Developments like these factor in my choice of cloud provider for future projects.

<comment><USER11> Not sure what size a "very small company" size is, but I'm just curious as to why you chose GKE. I make tech decisions for a (probably) much smaller company, and I found things like App Engine Flexible Environment, Cloud Run and Cloud Functions let me do much of the stuff I can do with k8s but with much, much less complexity (at least on my side of things). The main factor is that I don't have a full-time infrastructure expert, and my experience in the past is that k8s essentially requires that.

<comment><USER10> Less than 15 employees. Several products, two teams, <= 20 nodes.

We migrated our stuff from DigitalOcean around 2018. At the time, we briefly toyed with the notion of self-hosting Kubernetes on DO, but it's complex to manage, and we don't have any dedicated ops staff. GKE is significantly easier to manage.

At that time we migrated, the things you mentioned weren't available/mature, I think. Even today, I'd choose Kubernetes over a complex mishmash of different systems. I like the unified, extensible ops model. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I wish all of GCP could be managed as Kubernetes objects.

<comment><USER12> Re. managing GCP as Kubernetes resources: [https://cloud.google.com/config- connector/docs/overview](https://cloud.google.com/config- connector/docs/overview)

<comment><USER10> That's very cool, thanks! Note that this allows selectively _creating_ Kubernetes resources backed by GCP resources. Looks like it will not automatically sync everything that already exists, which seems like a missed opportunity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Last modified: November 27, 2018 | Previous Versions

> As of November 28, 2017, Google Kubernetes Engine no longer charges a flat > fee per hour per cluster for cluster management, regardless of cluster size, > as provided at [https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes- > engine/pricing](https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/pricing). > Accordingly, Google no longer offers a financially-backed service level > agreement for the Google Kubernetes Engine service. The service availability > of nodes in a Google Kubernetes Engine-managed cluster is covered by the > Google Compute Engine SLA at > [https://cloud.google.com/compute/sla](https://cloud.google.com/compute/sla).

> Uptime for Google Kubernetes Engine is nevertheless highly important to > Google, and Google has an internal goal to keep the monthly uptime > percentage at 99.5% for the Kubernetes API server for zonal clusters and > 99.95% for regional clusters regardless of the applicability of a > financially-backed service level agreement.

[https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes- engine/sla](https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/sla)

Interesting that they're now walking back from this...

<comment><USER14> Google, walking back their commitment to software? _gasp_

<comment><USER15> [https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/12341533883188715...](https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1234153388318871555)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good time for people to look into DigitalOcean managed Kubernetes (DOKS). I've been using it since it was in pre-release and its been great so far. Their support has been very responsive as well.

[https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/](https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/)

<comment><USER17> Care with DigitalOcean's Kubernetes offering. Unless they have completely revamped their entire stack since their initial release, it's a security nightmare. The way they launched it was unacceptable for any company to use. I immediately migrated my projects away and closed my account upon understanding how abysmally they screwed up the security of that offering. The fact they were willing to launch that means they cannot be trusted to host _anything_.

Not only are your cluster's administration ports exposed on public addresses with no ability to firewall them, but each node pulls an Admin-level auth token to manage the DigitalOcean account behind the scenes. A single http request made to an internal IP, _from within any Docker container running within the cluster_ , grants the attacker full read/write access and control to the underlying DigitalOcean account. This includes any developer who does so from code deployed into the cluster, giving the developer full access to the business's DigitalOcean account.

<comment><USER18> Are you referring to this? [https://www.4armed.com/blog/hacking-digitalocean- kubernetes/](https://www.4armed.com/blog/hacking-digitalocean-kubernetes/)

I'm curious as to whether that has been fixed and a proper security evaluation done. I've been avoiding k8s on DO for a while because of that (perfectly comfortable with their other services) but it would be good to get an update.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, that's the one. I'd done my own analysis before that came out and figured it was an unacceptable risk, and then that article came out with the actual attack vector in all its glory. The simple fact the k8s/etcd ports are exposed on a public address with no ability to firewall it off is bad enough, as you're relying on the security of the software running on those ports rather than a firewall restricting which source address(es) can even connect to begin with.

The credentials (certificates) being exposed via [http://169.254.169.254/metadata/v1/user- data](http://169.254.169.254/metadata/v1/user-data) – from within any pod/container, not just from a physical node – was the final straw. I'd forgotten that the DO token wasn't directly listed there, but can be extracted from the etcd instance where it is stored (explained under "DigitalOcean Account Takeover" of that article).

Again, all of this may have been (and hopefully has been) mitigated since the original release. For me, it's too late to reevaluate; the fact that was considered releasable in the first place destroyed any credibility in my eyes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This strikes me as an attribution problem e.g. Within large companies business units are treated as standalone financial entities so you are either making money or a cost center. I think what could be happening here is that the kubernetes group is generating what look like un-paid-for costs, instead of being back-credited for ALL of the compute they are selling via the worker VMs. I would argue that people come to GCP for GKE which means it should be seen as a revenue generator, in that light it makes sense to hold the loss leader of the control plane open and 'free' to grow GKE as quickly as possible. This decision is bad for business.

<comment><USER20> Well then this is perhaps a big failure by the execs at GCP. It's making the individual teams look good at the cost of unhappy customers.

Sometimes I think Google has phenomenal engineers, they have this massive ad cash cow from search, YouTube etc. However when it comes to business units that need to handhold their customers and need human interaction, they are pretty terrible at it. Empathy is perhaps a skill that's not important to them when they are hiring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> We moved our cluster into the Hetzner Cloud for Emvi [1]. Yes, they don't offer a managed solution and it took us about two weeks to set up and test the cluster properly. But the cost is less than 1/6 of what gcloud costs us. If you have the resources and knowledge to maintain your own cluster, check it out. They have insanely good pricing (2,96 €/month for the cheapest instance which is faster than Googles $15/month VM).

Here is a very good tutorial on how to set up your own cluster: [https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials/install- kubernetes-c...](https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials/install-kubernetes- cluster)

[1] [https://emvi.com/](https://emvi.com/)

<comment><USER22> Hetzner is solid from a perf / price perspective. Mind that the network peering outside Europe is not that great. So could be a very good choice depending on your user base' location.

<comment><USER21> True. In our experience it's fast enough. Additionally traffic is free unless you hit the 20 TB outgoing traffic per node (which probably will never happen to us). In contrast gcloud costs about 12ct per GB outgoing traffic (!!!).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> After this, I've been exploring other places to host our team's clusters... copied pricing below

\- EKS: $0.10/hour/cluster

\- Digital Ocean: Free (only charges for the nodes)

\- Azure: Free (only charges for the nodes)

In the long run we'll probably try and build our stack on vendor-agnostic tools..

\- Rancher - [https://rancher.com/products/rancher/](https://rancher.com/products/rancher/)

\- Infra.app - [https://infra.app](https://infra.app) (mentioned a few weeks back on the Kubernetes podcast)

\- Prometheus [https://prometheus.io/](https://prometheus.io/) \- metrics

The cloud providers all include their own tooling (logging, monitoring) built- in but I'm worried this will only lock us on to further price increases.. has anyone found a good vendor-neutral logging system? We don't really want to use ELK stack right now since it's really heavy and costly to run...

<comment><USER9> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22487110](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22487110)

<comment><USER23> Honestly I understand the hard work it takes to manage all the clusters, but this was a total bait and switch and hurts the reputation that everyone has with Google Cloud. Telling us to DIY because we cannot pay $71 just sounds like someone who works at Google would say, which you do work at Google.

The sentiment with my clients before was that Google Cloud was a great choice because of the security and expertise with GKE. It's also free!

Meanwhile, in the back of my head I've always had this fear because of your reputation that you do not keep your promises and that you do not care about your users. Because of this fear, we have tried to make every infrastructure decision not use a managed service by Google even though it may be easier to do so short-term.

For the product I'm working on, we decided to use Kubernetes just in case you baited and switched us with the reputation you have. In terms of monitoring, we really wanted to use Stackdriver, but now we're 100% using fluent-bit + prometheus + loki + grafana. It's the only way to protect ourselves from your reputation which is becoming a reality.

So yeah, this is pretty sad and a bad decision. Should have priced GKE at $70 / month to begin with and we would have been fine with it. Now we're (actually) looking at EKS since Amazon doesn't seem to have this reputation and you've spooked us. We never would have thought about using any other provider until today.

<comment><USER9> I understand the emotional response here, but I don't think it's rational. GKE has to work as a business, or else the whole thing is in trouble.

I think GKE provides tons of value, but people tend to under-estmate that. In order to keep providing that value, we need to make sure it is sustainable.

I'm really, truly sad that you perceive it as bait-and-switch, but I disagree with that characterization. If you want to move off GKE, I'll go out of my way to help you, but I urge you to take a big-picture look at the TCO.

<comment><USER24> I think part of the optic's issues is your peers seem to be offering similar services for free, while being sustainable.

<comment><USER9> EKS has always had a fee.

AKS, well, I don't have any insight into their business, but I have my suspicions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Oh wow, one of the biggest reasons we picked Google Cloud was that you did not have to pay a flat fee for their managed Kubernetes service. Luckily there is Kubernetes support across all Cloud Providers so we're happy we're not vendor locked in. (biggest reason we picked Kubernetes in the first place.)

We were thinking of using Stackdriver for logging, but we were scared of vendor locked in due to price increases or other changes that we've been warned about with Google. In this case, I think it's safe to say we'll be using Prometheus + Grafana + Loki instead since there may be a random Stackdriver flat fee introduced or some other weird fee and we may need to migrate out of Google.

<comment><USER10> Stackdriver is terrible, and super expensive for what it is. We ran a dedicated Fluentd in GKE for a long time to work around its shortcomings (GKE also uses/used Fluentd to shuffle logs into Stackdriver), then switched to using Loki + Promtail + Grafana, which has been excellent.

<comment><USER25> +1 for Loki + Promtail + Grafana. Really low maintenance once it's set up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "Let's trade goodwill for short term profits." I suppose not really surprising given the maps fiasco and Oracle appointment but this really comes off poorly to me.

Flat fee is gonna suck for people running a lot of clusters. I bet there are some people out there spinning up a cluster per x who are going to be real unhappy about this.

</comment><comment><USER27> I know the HN crowd hates this sort of thing, but seems reasonable to me. $70/month is a very reasonable price, and most businesses likely have well under 10 clusters (I'd think many just have 2-3, a single cluster for prod and then 1-2 dev/test type environments). This is probably mostly to cut down on edge cases users who are spinning up crazy numbers of clusters for weird reasons, and costing Google a bunch of $$$.

<comment><USER15> Furthermore, anyone spending enough on compute to warrant k8s shouldn't balk at all at $70/mo. I think the threshold for introducing the complexity and overhead of k8s isn't probably until at least $5-10k/mo of spend (and probably 3-10x that in the normal case). Less than that and k8s is a whole lot of overkill.

<comment><USER28> We use google cloud projects to isolate customers and environments. (Some of our clients are old school and VERY scared of cloud, and multi-tenant). so for our pretty small company, we have >60 projects, each with a k8s cluster. that is a pretty good bump in costs come this summer.

Historically, we have powered down all the compute in a project that isn't needed, but left the k8s cluster in place (with its compute nodes powered down) because we could then bring it back up in 2 min or less. That dropped our cost for each project that was powered down to ~$25-$50/month, depending on how much disk space, etc, they were using. this will more than double (or triple) the cost of those projects. If we have to rebuild a full cluster from scratch, we then have to wait for the global load balancer to build our ingress, and then go authorize a TLS cert. This adds 20-30 min to re- activating our projects, which will suck.

<comment><USER29> Perhaps the right thing for GKE to do is introduce a cluster snapshot. Sounds like a great feature.

<comment><USER28> That would actually be pretty awesome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Time to start looking into DigitalOcean more seriously.

G Cloud is already unreasonably expensive and nearly impossible to price manage. It's cool to see them double-down on that.

<comment><USER31> DO is pretty famous for losing data.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064169](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064169) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17225665](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17225665)

<comment><USER32> DO is famous for being a pain in the ass. They're great for tiny hobby things but honestly I'd never run a prod/serious/client workload there. Too many issues. I've had _multiple_ clients lose a droplet due to a simple credit card expiration.

It's a race to the bottom on price so this doesn't surprise me. They chose this life.

<comment><USER33> To be fair, what is the best way to handle expiring credit cards? For one of my SaaS products, I give a 30 day grace period, then delete the data. If they didn't have a backup, that's on them...

If they delete the droplet the second a single CC payment fails, that's one thing, but I don't believe that's how their system works.

<comment><USER32> If you are literally _in the business_ of enabling, storing, and protecting production workloads, data, etc.. then catastrophic data loss should be an asbolute last resort.

In both of these instances I am referring to a balance of less than $20.

So for less than $20 (a few weeks late) DO says, welp fuck this customer we are going to terminate all of their resources immediately.

This is what DO and others need to do: Put it in your terms that you will keep racking up charges and then send it to collections. Charge interest, charge fees, do whatever you want. Turn $20 into $40. Why? Because businesses do not give a shit... if it is between losing everything or a slap on the wrist (monetary fee) they will chose the latter every time.

One of my clients had to painstakingly trudge through archive.net to recreate their missing blog posts. How fucking miserable is that? Over a few hundred megabytes of disk that DO could have kept around...

Also, actally _make an effort_ to reach out before doing anything serious. Call phone numbers, email other members on the team to alert them to the issue, etc...

Too many times I have seen some script kiddie throw together a client's WP site and toss it on DO because it is 'so cheap and cool' and yet they forget about everything else: backups, security, managing the box, etc... and inevitably shit will hit the fan.

I was really rootin' for DO in the beginning. I even applied to work there when they were first starting out but did not want to relo to NY. Now I am moving three clients OFF of DO because they are all very unhappy with the level (or lack) of service they've received.

<comment><USER34> Or...if it was important enough to you that losing it hurts, then maybe pay attention to your emails and don't let things expire and pay your shit on time. And of course, a sane person would backup anything important.

<comment><USER35> Ok, lets say I store all my backups at AWS, Google and Azure. My credit card expires and all backups are gone. What's the point of additional backups in this scenario?

<comment><USER34> Aws, gcp and azure are unlikely to delete your shit the moment your card expires?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I run a hobby project in multiple zones because low latency is important, and Kubernetes makes it easy to do so.

There's no way I'm going to pay an extra $73/mo -- I already pay for the computing resources, this should be free.

Looks like I'll be moving away from GKE. It's a shame, I _was_ a big advocate.

<comment><USER4> We offer one free zonal cluster, which is specifically designed for your use case :)

<comment><USER37> I have personal experience of a few companies in the UK where GCP are offering 90+% discounts to onboard. GCP are spending hundreds of millions to do this. K8S control-planes are a rounding error compared to this.

You could have grandfathered in current deployments but - nope. In the tech world this is up there with killing Google Reader.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> It's interesting how naive the gcloud folks in commenting here seem to be about how it is to be an enterprise customer evaluating their service. Deploying to a cloud vendor is a bit like deciding to build a house on a rented lot. You place an incredible amount of trust in your landlord - unbelievable really. It's a miracle people do it at all in some ways. This kind of action is like Google going to their land for rent and posting earthquake signs on front of it. It is toxic to the most fundamental element of trust people rely on when they choose a cloud vendor. It can't possibly be worth whatever miniscule revenue they will accrue from implementing this.

</comment><comment><USER39> It's not so much about an additional fee (honestly, 0.10$ per hour are nothing) it's more about Googles practice of suddenly charging services, shutting down services as they like, not giving a shit about us customers. Azure and AWS are much more customer friendly here.

</comment><comment><USER40> A long time Google cloud customer who migrated away to DO recently. Here are the things Google gets completely wrong

\- They are way behind compared to AWS in terms of stability and features, even then they always demand similar premium (ref. recent incedent: [https://www.cbronline.com/news/google-cloud- down](https://www.cbronline.com/news/google-cloud-down))

\- Tax issues in foreign countries are never resolved. Due to Indian laws, we must pay TDS on our business payment and google has to refund them to us. It takes almost a year to get those refunds from Google. Not startup friendly.

\- No support!! If anything goes wrong, AWS or DO solved issues even technical ones at times even when you have no support plan purchased. Google literally is useless when it comes to support. They carry that attitude from their search business.

\- I see someone mentioned egress charges. In reality, cloud providers get super cheap bandwidth and they charge 9-10 cents for egress which is outrageous. It's not only Google but AWS as well but Google being new in market could have done better job here.

\- DO Kubernetes is free and as someone mentioned, control plane downtime does not matter until workloads are not affected.

\- In a nutshell, if I need stability, I will go to AWS, if I need better price, DO is not a bad choice. I am not sure where is Google positioned.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hey everyone - Seth from Google here. Please let us know if you have any questions! You can learn more about the pricing changes at [https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes- engine/pricing](https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/pricing).

<comment><USER41> This change is pretty huge for non-revenue units & small teams at institutions and SMBs. These smaller teams often seem to run two clusters rather than try to split their production and dev environments within one cluster (I think this is even widely recommended for smaller, less experienced outfits). For many the management fee will probably be a large percentage cost increase for units that are very cost sensitive and require significant re-engineering to avoid for units where engineer hours a scarce resource.

Seems weird, given that GKE is basically the main reason people seem to use Google Cloud. These kinds of users aren't big fish, but I suspect a lot of them are going to run.

<comment><USER42> Yeah. Having 1 free cluster will just encourage SMBs and hobbyists to resort to the bad practice of commingling dev and production, wont it? It's the same attitude that GitLab has with a lot of their CI stuff. It's not only huge enterprises that want to try to follow best practices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> > One zonal cluster per billing account is free

For hobby projects nothing will change.

</comment><comment><USER44> Note: Azure does not charge a master/cluster management fee (bias disclosure I work for Microsoft)

<comment><USER4> Attempting to capitalize on a competitor's announcement isn't cool and doesn't look great.

<comment><USER45> I don't work for Azure and having used both GKE and AKS, I can say GKE is superior, however, I don't understand why this comment isn't cool. It's not like they're capitalizing on your misery. It's a decision you have taken and it's a fair game IMO that they want to emphasize their advantage over you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Oh, so now in addition to Google's reputation for killing services, GCP wants a reputation for raising prices?

<comment><USER47> They have done it before. Remember Google Maps?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I don't like the direction this is heading, it seems like the SLA and the accompanying charge could easily have been optional.

We have a couple of dozen clusters, two per client, and can't change the architecture. We use helm and terraform and can build new clusters quickly but we can't treat them entirely like cattle because we don't own all the DNS. Our clients are not the sort to do things quickly - or even slowly.

Does anybody have any good and up to date resources comparing the current options for K8 providers? I'd like to get a feel for what it would take to switch.

<comment><USER49> As many have mentioned here already, $72/mo most likely a rounding error on workloads kubernetes is designed for.

I think, most customers love the change because of SLA where even 1 minute of downtime per year is amplitude more costly than 10 years of cluster managing fee.

This also showing the commitment from google to provide great and reliable service.

If you're looking to run k8s "for free", Digital Ocean looks like the way to go, but again, it's two completely different set of offerings and if you've chosen the google cloud in the first place then DO doesn't look like suitable alternative.

<comment><USER48> > As many have mentioned here already, $72/mo most likely a rounding error on > workloads kubernetes is designed for.

There are _many_ reasons to use k8 beyond just workload scale and that amount per cluster per month isn't anywhere near a rounding error for many deployments.

<comment><USER49> I would be interested to know when you may need kubernetes for small types of workload and simple architecture.

For my understating, support contract alone for google cloud will cost you around $150/mo.

For small to medium workloads there are plenty of tools if you want to use containers: docker swarm and nomad. Docker Swarm is really simple and most engineers already know it because of `docker-compose.yml` they're using each day.

I can't really understand what type of workload you have because kubernetes cluster management requires you to have at least 2 full-time DevOps team. What is $72 compared to salary of two employees?

If you have an issue with $72 for SLA guarantee then I can't really understand why you need google cloud at all. They are literally bound to maintain zero downtime because of huge losses if something go down for their entire customer base.

<comment><USER48> One simple example - of many: Enterprise clients with low workload but very sensitive data strict infosec and segregation requirements - several clusters per client all managed with infrastructure as code.

There are lots of benefits to k8 other than just scale, and there are architecture choices that are made for good reasons that rely on separate clusters with no particular need for a legal uptime SLA on a control plane.

This decision will cost us a lot more than $72 a month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I think that CRDs are partially to blame for this. CRDs can tax the API Server and backing data store, without directly mapping to a revenue-generating activity.

I've noticed a trend where teams spin up new clusters for each application. Since CRDs are installed on the cluster level, it is not possible to namespace resource versions. It is easier for teams to take the cluster-per-application approach as opposed to mandating a specific version of cluster tooling.

More small clusters means more control planes, and more subsidizing if a cloud provider is giving away the control plane.

I just finished a blog post on this opinion that goes into more detail- [https://caleblloyd.com/software/crds-killed-free- kubernetes-...](https://caleblloyd.com/software/crds-killed-free-kubernetes- control-plane/)

</comment><comment><USER51> If the trade is a SLA for a management fee, that is a reasonable business decision, and largely a rounding error for a decently sized company with a well designed clustering system. Lack of SLAs is a major issue IME with cloud providers.

</comment><comment><USER52> "Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman" [2008]

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.com...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman)

<comment><USER52> I know this is kinda against the guidelines, but just to highlight what an ideological war is being fought, at this moment, my parent post has received 5 upvotes and 6 downvotes, with the last 4 downvotes all occuring in the last minute.

On the content, RMS chose a colorful (insulting) language, yes, do hold that against him, because _that_ is wrong, but in my opinion, at the core, his statements are quite legit.

<comment><USER53> I am grateful for Stallman's efforts but claiming cloud is a nefarious plot no matter the style is not "legit".

As for the voting, join the club. Like all communities online HNN is an often hypocritical cliquefest where the mob will have its way. But at least it's not r __ __;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> This is seriously such a bummer. This was the main reason for us moving out of AWS

<comment><USER55> We also jumped over for this reason and had to deal with a large number of gotchas from GCP. I kinda wish I never spent the long nights on this...

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> That's about $72 a month, which matches Amazon EKS's lowered pricing. I guess that rules out my hopes of EKS not charging for the management plane in the near future.

<comment><USER57> It looks like Google's offering one free cluster per billing account if I read that right. If that's not the case, I'll be turning off my cluster before this kicks in.

<comment><USER58> One zonal cluster per billing account is free

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Wow, this is a huge bummer. A lot of our infrastructure assumptions have been based around having several small GKE clusters.

<comment><USER9> I think this trend is not good overall, and people will eventually be very unhappy with it. I'd rather help you figure out how to use fewer clusters.

<comment><USER60> Tim, would you be willing to elaborate on why you dislike the "many small clusters" pattern?

<comment><USER9> Many small clusters just do not deliver on a lot of the value of Kubernetes. Clusters are still hard boundaries to cross (working to fix that). Utilization and efficiency are capped. OpEx goes up quickly.

There are reasons to have multiple clusters, but I think the current trend takes that too far.

TO BE SURE - there's more work to do in k8s and in GKE.

<comment><USER60> As always, the insight is appreciate, Tim!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> This is really disappointing. GKE was a staple amongst Kubernetes adoption, not only for the feature-set but also that there were no overhead costs.

I hope GCP re-thinks this.

<comment><USER9> For folks just trying it out, 1 cluster is still free.

<comment><USER62> For folks just trying it out, 1 cluster is still free... in a single physical data centre. Sadly you'll be charged for running a cluster across two or three data centres in the same availability zone (eg London).

<comment><USER9> This is a fair point. We don't have an HA (multi-master) zonal offering either, because mostly people don't want that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> $72/month per cluster, regardless of the size. It's interesting they're not charging per managed node (outside of the regular machine cost), makes it steep if you want to have a small cluster up.

<comment><USER64> Each billing account gets 1 free zonal cluster so the cost for keeping a small cluster up won't change.

<comment><USER65> How do if i know if my cluster is zonal? Does it mean all nodes are vms provisioned in the same zone?

<comment><USER66> >Single-zone clusters

>A single-zone cluster has a single control plane (master) running in one zone. This control plane manages workloads on nodes running in the same zone.

[https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes- engine/docs/concepts/typ...](https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes- engine/docs/concepts/types-of-clusters)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> You Probably Don't Need Kubernetes

If you're small, you can probably just run a few containers/VMs with automatic restart.

If you're big, you already made something custom like Borg.

Who's it for? Temporarily embarrassed unicorns?

</comment><comment> pcj-github Thomas Kurian is going to be the Steve Ballmer of Google, and he's currently tearing up Google from the inside. Google leadership need to wise up and give this guy his walking papers.

<comment><USER68> he is like GKE, once you start him, you can't stop :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I am really disappointed by this. One of the reasons we moved to GCP from AWS was the ability to create multiple clusters at no extra charge. Now it looks like the pricing matches EKS.

</comment><comment><USER69> I don't offhand remember AWS increasing prices for a service before but I might be wrong. How often does Google increase prices?

For a business I prefer a company that starts with higher prices and then only lowers them to one that may increase them at any time.

<comment><USER70> Having worked for AWS, one of the things we got a lot push back from was offering something free and then walk back from it.

AWS really strongly focuses on gaining customer trust, and they will only lower price, and never increase price. They won't turn off things until the last customer stops using it (they might stop new customers from onboarding)

I did not enjoy working for AWS so I left pretty fast, but some of the customer obsession there really impressed me.

<comment><USER71> For a AWS product manager, pricing is a one-way door once you cross it there is no way back from it you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> I was an early adopter of Google App Engine when it was first released and the consistency guarantees of the datastore burned me pretty badly. What I experienced in the test environment was not even remotely close to what I got in production.

Just last week, I was so tempted to give Google another shot over AWS. By all accounts, they have come so far, and more importantly, started using more of my preferred toolset as well. This is exactly the kind of thing that really scares me off.

I have a huge amount of respect for the world class systems scientists and engineers at Google. Unfortunately, they seem to counter it with a customer experience full of uncomfortable, often expensive surprises.

</comment><comment><USER73> We're a little bit too locked to GCP to migrate out.... But I'll definitely stop evangelizing GCP to people.

I have now lost faith in you, GCP.

<comment><USER68> same here - losing face now with my team when I argued for GCP (and won) against AWS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> And this is why when Google's team comes knocking on your door enticing your company to move to GCP from AWS you should ask for at least one years worth of credit at minimum.

While you transition leave as many doors open to switch back.

</comment><comment><USER20> The email definitely scared me and put a sour taste in my mouth. Sudden fee changes with somewhat vague details aren't a great way to build trust.

Especially when GCP doesn't have a great rep like Azure and AWS.

To clarify, this is hourly charge per entire cluster right ? If it's a small cost, ~100/month, why can't GCP absorb it. Digital ocean, which is a smaller player has much simpler and saner pricing.

AFAIK GCP has higher compute pricing for similar instances compared to AWS. (Last I checked). How is this a good deal for the customers ?

</comment><comment><USER75> I think this is _fair_ : for hobbyists, a free zonal cluster is sufficient and you probably wouldn't use more than one cluster. For businesses/revenue drivers, the $7.30/mo/cluster is nothing (EDIT: actually $73/mo/cluster, which may be a tougher sell but if the business is in a case where it benefits from Kubernetes, it's still likely insignificant relative to the cost of actually running the VMs on it )

<comment><USER61> If I'm not mistaken, it should be $73.00+/mo

<comment><USER75> Oops, I can't math. Fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> The guarantees for uptime with 99.5% for regional and 99.5% for zonal clusters seem pretty good. Is this above the average in terms of cloud providers?

<comment><USER77> Small typo: 99.95% for regional. It's similar to AWS with a 99.9% for EKS clusters. Also not sure what GKE's new SLA reimbursement structure will be going forwards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> There's this theory - "CRDs Killed the Free Kubernetes Control Plane"

[https://caleblloyd.com/software/crds-killed-free- kubernetes-...](https://caleblloyd.com/software/crds-killed-free-kubernetes- control-plane/)

Basically running etcd in production with reasonable SLA and more than a little bit of data is super hard.

</comment><comment><USER79> I haven't done cost calculations yet, but this might actually make me want to explore to EKS pricing. I do love the experience of GKE.

<comment><USER56> It's the same as the new pricing that EKS has at $0.10/hour. Guess that rules out my hopes of EKS not charging for the management plane any time in the near future. :'(

<comment><USER4> It's slightly different than other cloud pricing because we include a free zonal cluster as a hobby tier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> Careful Google, free Kube is GCP's only big-shiny draw and you've just cut that into quarters.

</comment><comment><USER44> Note: Azure does not charge a master/cluster management fee (bias disclosure I work for Microsoft)

</comment><comment><USER68> This is penny wise pound foolish GCP.

</comment><comment><USER54> At one side EKS is slashing their prices and on the other GKE is increasing it :(

</comment><comment><USER81> "Anthos GKE clusters are exempt from this fee"

Adopt Anthos or pay, basically.

<comment><USER82> As long as they don't support kvm Anthos is going to be tough sell, considering the VMware premium.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> There actually was a 15/cent/hr fee a few years back:

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2017/11/29/google-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2017/11/29/google- drops-cluster-management-fee-from-its-managed-kubernetes-service-offering/)

YMMV, but I think the value prop of using a managed GKE cluster vs the raw costs and engineering time to run your own control plane is still strong.

</comment><comment><USER84> I guess I need to start migrating my clusters, then. $73 per cluster on my prod, dev, QA, and test clusters is a significant increase for me. Looks like Google is doing their best to kill off GCP - [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/17/google-reportedly-wants- to-b...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/17/google-reportedly-wants-to-be-top- two-player-in-cloud-by-2023.html)

<comment><USER28> Curious where you are going to go that is going to be cheaper for the management plane and work nodes.

<comment><USER84> AWS+kops is less expensive. Digital Ocean and Azure provide services without charging for master nodes.

I will likely choose AWS+kops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> tedk-42 The number of people that still trust google not to screw customers over is amazing.

They got you into their tech by offering something for free - now they're upping the price to match the leading competitor (in cloud that is).

Better than getting you into their ecosystem and discontinuing a service I suppose.

I hope this backfires on them and they provide it 'free forever' as they would have received a lot of customers drawn in from their free GKE control plane offering

</comment><comment><USER85> Ahh, wonderful. You're taking away the only thing that made me pick GCP and GKE over AWS and EKS?

AWS used to charge me for the master node, and it was more than the worker nodes cost. So the logic reaction to AWS lowering that cost to a flat $.10 an hour was for Google to raise their own price point to that??????

As a GCP customer, I've got one simple question. Why exactly should I continue to use GKE?

</comment><comment><USER86> The good ol' bait and switch tactic; lure new customers in with zero fees and switch out the fee structure once they're locked in.

</comment><comment><USER87> I've been mentioning Google's penny pinching for awhile here. Simple things like Chrome's address bar showing google searches before my bookmarks. It's all part of the monetization. Are fees like this because Google is struggling to continue to grow? That's probably the most concerning thing for Google's future, rather than a $73 fee.

</comment><comment><USER88> One of the reasons I recommend GKE over EKS is because of the lack of fees on the control plane.

I guess that one advantage is gone now...

Bad move Google Cloud. Bad move.

</comment><comment><USER89> AKS still has a free control plane. GCP won my business for a bit, but quickly lost it based on some features. I still love StackDriver and BigQuery, but don't love doing business with GCP- the sales/support experience was pretty lacking, networking for serverless was immature for multi-region, and what they are doing with Anthos feels like Oracle (it is).

</comment><comment><USER90> There are so many issues with this. I used GCP because I liked the service and was able to build all of my stuff well on it. My personal projects already make me shell out over $250 a month because of running costs and now you want to gouge me for hourly running of a cluster I alraid pay hourly of compute time for? What in the actual hell...

</comment><comment><USER91> The SLA guarantee for stable is interesting because at every turn the documentation and our TAMs encourage us to switch from Stable channel to the Regular.

Workload Identity, for example, is pushed hard, but it's Beta so there's no SLA and it's broken in Stable so if you use it you're going to have outages or be forced onto Regular.

</comment><comment><USER92> Are there any other companies doing managed Kubernetes in GCP?

If there was interest I could try to build a third party clone of GKE running in all GCP regions and still managing GCP VM's, and I could run it for a lot less than $0.10 per hour (although obviously it would take many months of refinement till I could offer a decent SLA)

<comment><USER93> Azure and AWS both have managed Kubernetes ...

<comment><USER92> But a lot of businesses have a reason to stick to GCP. For example if you need access to TPU's... You can't easily use Azure kubernetes with the actual VM's running in GCP...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> Years ago, GKE had a $0.15/hr charge for clusters with more than 5 nodes. They dropped that and other clouds matched them. Now they're adding back a fee for all clusters.

Bringing back that original min cluster size would be a good idea and probably solve a lot of the issues with people running dev/stage clusters.

</comment><comment><USER95> I'm not gonna beat on the dead horse, but with GKE increase I need to explain why I choose GCP for GKE and other services like new KFP. The increase is not much TBH but the point is that there is an increase and tomorrow could be BQ and then later APIs...I don't know what to say to my manager now...

<comment><USER96> I honestly can't tell if this is satire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> Those who had a chance to look deeper into k8s control structure, can comprehend such movement. There's no free lunch. I mean master nodes, etcd and all that stuff in HA has its costs. That's it. Surprisingly, AWS announced 50% price reduction for EKS control plane January this year :)

</comment><comment><USER98> This is not cool. One of the best parts of GCP is that the control plane is free for k8s. :( this change is simply a money grab at least optically.

How does the exemption for anthos clusters work? If I enable it on my cluster but it's still a GCP native cluster and not on non-premises one, am I still billed?

</comment><comment><USER99> I wish there was a "Preemptible" or more cost effective tier for GKE. I get why they're doing this and $70/month seems reasonable for a premium service but would be nice to have a more cost effective option similar with tradeoffs similar to "Preemptible" nodes.

</comment><comment><USER100> Now is the right time to Terraform stuff and get some portability in. We can help you out if you need to be quickly up and running on Infrastructure-as- Code \---> [https://www.cloudskiff.com/](https://www.cloudskiff.com/)

</comment><comment><USER101> Does anyone have any opinions on alternative stacks to GKE within GCP? My side project is all dockerized. We love that aspect. Google Cloud Run looks promising, but it's not available in Sydney, which rules it out for us unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER102> This makes GKE pretty much impossible to use for side projects. Given that it will cost $100 per cluster per month without including the instance costs.

Edit: A single zonal cluster per GCP account is exempt from this fee, so this comment is inaccurate.

<comment><USER9> Free (zonal) cluster per account, regardless of size, should cover a lot of this, no?

<comment><USER102> Great point! Didn't catch that one. I'll edit my comment

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> That's kind of a lot. $876 per year for a toy cluster that might not do anything...

</comment><comment><USER104> Why is the third in place cloud (GCP) making their offering worse than the second place one (Azure)? DigitalOcean also doesn't charge per cluster. Not to mention how behind the Kubernetes releases they are...

</comment><comment><USER105> I'm not sure why everyone is so surprised. Part of Google's monetization model is to offer developer-friendly software for free, then charge a small fee once it crosses the headache-to-replace threshold.

</comment><comment><USER106> GKE is the best Kubernetes offering according to my investigation of Azure/AWS/GCP. However adding extra $73/mo is not trivial for small teams like us. That is price of a medium-classed VM...

</comment><comment><USER107> Not that I invested much in GCP but this was just what I needed to completely stay away from it myself and my clients. Really awful decision. I'm sorry for those affected who trusted them.

</comment><comment><USER108> What resources would the cluster mgmt require? I always thought k8s was perfect cloud platform as the management was minimal and you're actually paying for the pod resources you require.

</comment><comment><USER109> Now I'm not sure what sure what we were paying for when we paid for our cluster? Isn't the price we pay to use/build the cluster the payment for the cluster?

</comment><comment><USER110> And I just cancelled all my Kubernetes side projects on GCP

</comment><comment><USER111> Wait until people realize gcp might not exist after 2022 if it's not profitable. Better pay for it than have your platform yanked out from under you.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Better still to take this opportunity to get out before Google does what Google does best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER112> How many businesses really need Kubernetes? Can't you orchestrate infrastructure + rolling deploys with Terraform + Docker containers?

<comment><USER113> I'm not aware of any rolling deploy functionality with terraform or docker.

Docker swarm does, but they are primarily using swarm with kubernetes these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER114> Just a reminder to everyone: avoid proprietary services such Google datastore/firestore, etc! There is no (easy) migration path.

</comment><comment><USER115> So what makes anyone think this is the last?

</comment><comment><USER116> i can't remember the last time AWS raise the price of their services.

in fact, i can only recall when they reduce price.

</comment><comment><USER117> Just got this email. $0.10 per hour is so much for something that was 0 per hour before. Wow these guys. The chutzpah! This isn't just offensive monetarily, it's offensive like price gouging is offensive. It's emotionally offensive. Gotta look somewhere else. Shame.

</comment><comment><USER118> Ah, the sound of former Oracle executives counting their GCP bonuses.

<comment><USER119> Why people think cloud providers are benevolent provider of infra is beyond me. Their margin is because people are willing to pay it. Either run your own metal (k8s arguably makes this easier than VMs along in the past) or form a cloud coop, but absolutely don't be shocked when a business is taking money off the table because they can.

Don't marry yourself to a provider, stay portable, it's just good risk management. Pricing changes? Spin up a cluster elsewhere, migrate data, migrate traffic, profit. The terms of the agreement can change at any time.

<comment><USER69> Different companies make money using different approaches and it's perfectly valid to be upset at the approach a particular company is taking. Just because they provide a service doesn't mean they'll try to f __* you over at every chance. For some it 's bad long term business to do that.

AWS, for example, begins with high prices and then lowers them over time. It costs money but you know the maximum.

Google seems to be grabbing you with cheap prices and then jacking them up when you're committed (google maps is another example offhand). Maybe no on purpose but bad initial pricing and ill-intent have the same impact externally.

<comment><USER119> > AWS, for example, begins with high prices and then lowers them over time. It > costs money but you know the maximum.

Past performance is no guarantee of future benevolence or reasonable behavior.

<comment><USER120> > Past performance is no guarantee of future benevolence or reasonable > behavior.

Sure, but pushing prices down and eating competitors margin to the benefit of the customer has been Amazon's MO since inception.

Google seems to make a lot of missteps wrt pricing and the cloud. Remember the geo pricing change that put a lot of projects out of business??

<comment><USER119> Amazon's bandwidth charges are still extortionate. Have those ever gone down?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER121> I guess I won't be using GCP then.

</comment><comment><USER122> Alternatively, don't use kubernetes.

[https://doineedkubernetes.com/](https://doineedkubernetes.com/)

<comment><USER123> Thems fightin words around these parts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER124> That's it, I'm out of GCP.

They could at least start working on fixing their horrendous documentation.

</comment><comment><USER125> Try project Gardener.

It's fully open source and uses kubernetes to run kubernetes control planes and manage underlying infrastructure across many infrastructure providers.

Manage homogeneous kubernetes clusters across Azure, AWS, GCP, Alicloud, OpenStack, VMWare at scale. Kubernetes on bare metal with Packet Cloud or using open source metal-stack coming soon.

Extensible for other infrastructures, contribute support for your favorite infrastructure.

Automation of day 2 operations e.g. etcd management including automated backup/restore.

Choose kubernetes version, DNS provider, operating system, network plugins, container runtimes.

Extended cluster services like DNS management and TLS certificate services.

[https://gardener.cloud/](https://gardener.cloud/) [https://github.com/gardener](https://github.com/gardener) [https://kubernetes.io/blog/2018/05/17/gardener/](https://kubernetes.io/blog/2018/05/17/gardener/) [https://kubernetes.io/blog/2019/12/02/gardener-project- updat...](https://kubernetes.io/blog/2019/12/02/gardener-project-update/) [https://landscape.cncf.io/selected=gardener](https://landscape.cncf.io/selected=gardener)

[https://github.com/gardener?q=extension- provider](https://github.com/gardener?q=extension-provider) [https://github.com/gardener?q=gardener-extension- os](https://github.com/gardener?q=gardener-extension-os) [https://github.com/gardener?q=gardener-extension- networking](https://github.com/gardener?q=gardener-extension-networking) [https://github.com/metal-stack/gardener-extension- provider-m...](https://github.com/metal-stack/gardener-extension-provider- metal)

[https://www.packet.com/developers/integrations/container- man...](https://www.packet.com/developers/integrations/container- management/gardener/) [https://github.com/metal- stack](https://github.com/metal-stack) [https://knative.dev/docs/install/knative-with- gardener/](https://knative.dev/docs/install/knative-with-gardener/)

</comment><comment><USER126> slowly killing the competition

</comment><comment><USER127> A very basic truth that AWS understands is that you introduce a product at price X, and then either keep it at X or reduce the price moving forward. You never, ever, EVER increase prices on established products. You also basically never discontinue products, even if there's only a handful of customers still using it (ex: SimpleDB).

Apparently it's just too tempting to Google management to juice revenue in the short term, but screw their customer trust and adoption in the longer term.

<comment><USER128> We see it again and again and again and again. I'm amazed that people still put trust into Google's services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER129> I saw someone mention Digital Ocean k8s products, right now Linode has a Linode Kubernetes Engine (LKE) "Beta" program going on where they give you some credits to fool around. I've been using it to learn k8s myself, and it couldn't be easier to use for a beginner.

[https://www.linode.com/products/kubernetes/](https://www.linode.com/products/kubernetes/)

I'm not even going to post or give anyone my Linode referral code, because I think their product is so good I'm happy to promote it for free, for no credit, especially if it can help someone leave Google for good.

</comment><comment><USER130> What's the betting line on GCP shutdown? Q3 2021? Q2?</comment>


What's your favorite Javascript framework? - <AUTHOR>

Getting a little fed up with Prototype in Ruby on Rails. What are you all using? <comment><USER2> YUI's worked pretty well for me. The documentation is decent, and the code seems to have good support from Yahoo.

<comment><USER3> We're using YUI too. Has worked well for us so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A vote for MooTools, although jQuery is very nice as well.

<comment><USER5> MooTools is the truth.

<comment><USER6> MooTools is a fantastic library, with very solid motion tweening and decent documentation/examples. jQuery is also a very solid library.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> JQuery, but I haven't tried a big variety. Right now, I'm using Prototype because that's what Weblocks uses by default.

<comment><USER8> me too

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Prototype plus YUI, looking at jQuery

</comment><comment><USER10> Just curious, what sucks about Prototype? It basically fixes everything that's broken with Javascript, which is about all I want my framework to do.

</comment><comment><USER11> Big fan of Mochikit. As a python programmer it's got some good pythonic interfaces but it doesn't trample on the elegance of Javascript.

<comment><USER12> Second that. Mochikit has been rock-solid and a breeze to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> jQuery.

</comment><comment><USER14> Prototype 1.6 has some nice new features, and mootools is cool, but jQuery definitely wins.

</comment><comment><USER15> shouldn't the title read "whats your favorite ruby Javascript framework?"

I was hoping for info on dojo, etc....

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure I understand. Why can't you use Dojo with Ruby on Rails? You lose the built-in ruby wrapper functions, but they're not required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> JQuery, plus occasional YUI

</comment><comment><USER17> prototype is fairly annoying. i use it daily but prefer moo and jquery.

</comment><comment><USER18> jquery... hands down

</comment><comment><USER19> prototype + ExtJS</comment>


How to decrypt WhatsApp end-to-end media files - <AUTHOR> https://blog.erratasec.com/2020/01/how-to-decrypt-whatsapp-end-to-end.html <comment><USER2> It's possible the forensics experts couldn't extract the video encryption key because the malware itself had decided to corrupt/remove it.

It would make sense - if you're distributing a (very expensive) zero day exploit to a target, you want to make sure that as soon as the exploit code runs and leaves the payload, the exploid code is removed and scrubbed, and any evidence of how the payload got there is hidden or removed. Deliberately changing the encryption key stored in whatsapps message database would be a good way to do that, as would locking down backups, usb ports, and generally things that make forensics difficult.

<comment><USER3> Sure its possible, but if they were actually forensics "experts" then they would have been able to explain exactly what you did. That the decryption key was removes from the device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another tool which was posted on HN a couple of days ago to demonstrates how to decrypt encrypted media files downloaded from WhatsApp: [https://github.com/ddz/whatsapp-media- decrypt](https://github.com/ddz/whatsapp-media-decrypt)

</comment><comment><USER2> I can confirm that there are opensource projects to send and receive (and hence encrypt and decrypt) WhatsApp media files, and they have been around for a long time.

Any forensics expert ought to know about them.

The fact these didn't probably means we should question the rest of the report.

<comment><USER5> Is there any reason why you can't name them please, for those of us who weren't aware?

<comment><USER2> For example: [https://github.com/tgalal/yowsup](https://github.com/tgalal/yowsup)

The code is a bit nightmarish, but it's hackable to do whatever you like. Whatsapp will ban you if they detect you using it, so make sure to update the client version numbers etc, and use a burner number for testing if using their live servers.

<comment><USER5> Thank you - especially for the hints :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think there is some bit of over-simplification in the argument that just because video can't be decrypted, it is likely benign. The acknowledgement of a buffer overflow exploit by facebook through a CVE ([https://www.facebook.com/security/advisories/cve-2019-11931](https://www.facebook.com/security/advisories/cve-2019-11931)) points to a definite vulnerability in Whatsapp which can be abused through a video. Timeline wise, it seems highly likely that it could have been abused.

<comment><USER7> I don't think the article is making a great argument the video is benign; however, they're making a decent argument that the investigation was incomplete and doesn't present any non-circumstantial evidence of Saudi involvement.

Like you say, the CVE is interesting, and I don't think there's a public description of the flaw. The article doesn't actually analyse the video: which is a bit odd since they are able to decrypt it. If the flaw is a buffer overflow in the MPEG stream parsing, it appears it would be reasonably easy to demonstrate that the MP4 file in question had been specially crafted, even if you couldn't directly demonstrate the exploit....

<comment><USER8> No, they _couldn 't_ decrypt the file on Bezos' phone. Because they don't have the phone, or even the file.

TFA actually says that clearly:

> Remember that this example is a video a friend sent to me, and not the > original video sent by MBS to Bezos. But the same principle applies. Simply > look in that file in the backup, extract the URL and mediakey, insert into > this program, and you'll get that file decrypted.

What they've demonstrated is a method that should work on Bezos' phone.

Edit: OK, I see that they get the encrypted file from the WhatsApp server:

> mediaurl = [https://mmg-fna.whatsapp.net/d/f/[string].enc](https://mmg- > fna.whatsapp.net/d/f/\[string\].enc)

So might the Saudi file in question have been deleted from WhatsApp?

Could the Saudis have done that?

<comment><USER7> WhatsApp themselves may have deleted it, who knows. I guess the point is, they claim to have the file, but haven't attempted to analyse it.

I don't think anyone was claiming it wasn't video - it plays in the app, so clearly the majority of the data is indeed regular MPEG. And it's difficult to prove that an exploit _isn't_ present, especially if the payload could be hidden in the video stream (since you could control the video frames, you can likely hide a significant amount of data before you need to resort to actual steganography).

But, given the claim (that a remote exploit was used to gain C&C over the phone), there must be _something_ odd in there: metadata that doesn't make sense, frames of video not used, etc. - because there's an overflow (which probably means some byte index or something in the metadata is bad) and an exploit (there's a payload in there making use of the overflow). At the very least, some regular software like ffmpeg will complain during decoding that stuff doesn't make sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What an excellent post, thank you. The author discusses complex topics in an accessible way. It's gems like these that keep me coming back to HN every day.

<comment><USER10> Really? I was like "wao, he has found a way to break encryption" only to figure out he is decryption using the key. End to end encryption is all about preventing man in the middle attack. Not about preventing a second way for decrypting at end points.

<comment><USER9> I don't think he alluded to breaking / cracking the encryption. Decrypting messages is not that same thing as breaking encryption. In fact he demonstrates how Whatsapp have done things properly and at the same time demystifies how the whole thing works. He doesn't actually explain end-to-end encryption, but only indicates that that is the mechanism used to transfer the secret key from the sender to the receiver.

<comment><USER8> And further, it calls into question the ~FBI report's claim that the file was "end-to-end encrypted", so they couldn't inspect it.

And as others note, if the key had been deleted, they should have said that it had.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Related question: Does anyone know how to decrypt the Whatsapp database on Android without root?I'd like to do the same process described in the article but I'm using Android

<comment><USER12> You can probably use `adb backup` (described here: [https://www.technipages.com/how-to-backup-your-entire- androi...](https://www.technipages.com/how-to-backup-your-entire-android- device)), then extract the backup using `android-backup-extractor`: [https://github.com/nelenkov/android-backup- extractor](https://github.com/nelenkov/android-backup-extractor).

<comment><USER13> Whatsapp has disallowed backups this way for some time.

I've seen some people advocate replacing the installed version with an older one which does allow backups (by uninstall and reinstall, hoping the uninstall can be done in such a way as to not delete the app data) then use ADB backup on that one and reupgrade before launching it, but honestly it's easier to backup, restore on a rooted phone, extract the key, then restore again on the unrooted phone to get service back (the key doesn't change afaik).

You can do this on a different phone without messing about with SIM swapping etc, you just need access to receive SMS messages on the number the backup is tied to.

<comment><USER11> Seems like this is the easiest way - Thanks for your help!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For the whatsapp encryption scheme because the IV is fixed per a media key is there any reason not just to set it all to zeros or a fixed value instead of using the KDF to derive it.

<comment><USER15> There is no technicqal reason for using unique IVs in this case. But it does not hurt and looks better in security audits.

Edit: there is also an line of reasoning that you should not needlessly expose cryptographic primitives to "non-random"/"structured" inputs as a defense in depth against attacks on such primitives. But when that matters it simply means that the primitive is broken and should not be used (or at least should not be used in that particular way, eg. TEA as hash function in original Xbox firmware).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > decrypt the video, using a tool I just created on GitHub

Hahaha I was hoping for a bit more in depth detail about this 'step'

<comment><USER17> The article links to the code: [https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/whats- enc/blob/master/b...](https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/whats- enc/blob/master/backend/whats-enc.py) and provides an explanation of what it does: AES decryption with CBC mode.</comment></comment>


Did Apple's fanboy fever peak with Steve Jobs? - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/02/tech/mobile/steve-jobs-apple-fanatics/

<comment><USER2> No.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines>

</comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps is the fact that the iOS6 has problems, and people are experiencing crashes and freezes from their iPhones?</comment>


The "Facebook Nevers" - <AUTHOR> https://500ish.com/the-facebook-nevers-14af0a4ea5ea <comment><USER2> "The fall of Facebook was never going to be people quitting the service en masse — it's too interwoven into the fabric of the way many of us use the web these days — it was always going to be the people who never really use the service in the first place. Kids."

I've noticed this amongst my family. The cousins, etc I have under 16 either don't have a facebook account or abandoned shortly after creating it. It's "uncool" because their parents see everything they do on there -- I know you can customize your sharing, but I doubt they know or care to be that careful on Facebook.

"This is why the smartest thing Facebook ever did was buy Instagram. Instagram is likely past a billion active users on its own now."

Unfortunately, this is why I don't use IG. I want to, but it seems impossible for me to keep it out of my Facebook like I want to. FB always pops up with "look what your friends are doing on IG" and I don't want my photography to be plastered in front of my grandparents.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's that hard to not share Instagram posts to Facebook. Can't you just unlink your account?

<comment><USER2> Not that I could find. I remember trying to use an alternative email even, but it was my back up email on Facebook and it linked them automatically.

<comment><USER4> If this is the case for you, maybe it only applies to newer Instagram accounts since I had mine long before the acquisition and my posts go to FB only by choice (and I almost never choose that anymore).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The only thing in Facebook that keeps me on the platform is Events.

I wish somebody would create an open, federated Events implementation, and copy all event data (including rsvps) from FB continuously.

<comment><USER6> I have been using Meetup for the past month and I'm pleasantly surprised.

Besides the even thing, your group also gets a discussion board, mailing list, photo sharing and a few other tools.

The cost might be a barrier to the adoption but I'm hoping it will grow more

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a "Social Media Never", and an increasing number of people I know are the same. We might sometimes use some forums or news/comment aggregators like HN or Reddit at some level, but none of the big social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.

<comment><USER8> This categorization doesn't pass the sniff test. Reddit is as much a "big social media platform" as Twitter is a "forum or news/comment aggregator". The main difference IMO is the average quality of discussion.

<comment><USER9> reddit works great without an account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hardly a novel analysis, or any new information. It has been written about for years how Facebook is weak in the under 13 demographic. That's why they not only bought Instagram, but also thoroughly copied Snapchat and crammed it into the Instagram app. Similarly, jokes have been out there for a while about how nobody is on Facebook anymore but your grandma.

Personally, I did quit Facebook, after years of less rewarding interactions, and an increasing amount of friction with the site. Often the newsfeed's choices of content felt personally insulting. It's a habit to visit, even though it really doesn't offer much, like smoking.

What I did is I change my password to something that I don't remember to break the habit. Then, in the time it would take to recover the password and sign in, I have already remembered that I don't want to. I haven't been there in a couple of weeks, and the last times I did, my notifications were quite dull.

One thing that reinforces quitting is that not using the site for a while seems to greatly reduce the reach of posts when you return. When I post content and get no responses it feels humiliating, like I appear to have no friends who are interested in my content. In reality, Facebook is showing my content to very few people. I get about 10 times the response on Instagram, from basically the same group of people, and it was even more so before they partially ruined Instagram by making the feed more like Facebook.

<comment><USER11> > I appear to have no friends who are interested in my content.

Are you a magazine journalist? If not, why do you have "content"?

Maybe Facebook has trained you to believe you're playing a churnalism RPG, and that your ability to grind for Likes reflects your value as a person.

<comment><USER10> I think you're extrapolating that from my use of the term 'content', but I'm merely referring to whether anyone responds to my occasional posts about my work or life. I have thousands of connections on Facebook, but when I put up something, I'll get one like, from my dad. The same thing on Instagram, and I would get actual communication with the peer group that I was intending to communicate with.

All I'm trying to is casually keep in touch with my friends and acquaintances. The like/heart/favorite serves as a register that someone read it and/or cared enough to send that signal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> oh gee, i just LOVE websites that have about 300 pixels of readable space.

get rid of the huge fixed headers and fixed footers garbage. PLEASE. fuck this stupid trend.

<comment><USER13> There is a fix for Medium[0] but the general trend of massive boilerplates and little content really needs to die.

0\. [https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA](https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the main question is what happens to the "Facebook nevers" generation once they graduate from college. Do they continue not using Facebook or do they accept that given the lifestyles in 20s, 30s and 40s, Facebook is the right product to be in.

The fact that Snapchat, which is a very popular product for teens/college users, usage continues to stagnate tells me that the "Facebook nevers" is not really a proven theory but just another hypothesis. Instagram, otoh, is popular across all age groups.

</comment><comment><USER15> That's pretty much how I've always seen it. Facebook as a singular product will eventually wilt and go the way of friendster and myspace. The smart thing Zuckerberg has done is to keep acquiring the next big things. Facebook as a company is extremely well-situated and won't be going anywhere any time soon, even though Facebook will eventually die out or become utterly worthless.

<comment><USER16> > The smart thing Zuckerberg has done is to keep acquiring the next big > things.

Though that strategy requires the cooperation of both the government and the leaders of those "next big things."

The founder of the next big social network may prefer to be the next Mark Zuckerberg rather than the next Kevin Systrom.

<comment><USER8> > The founder of the next big social network may prefer to be the next Mark > Zuckerberg rather than the next Kevin Systrom.

/me looks at Wikipedia page of Kevin Systrom

> Net worth: 1.6 billion $

I think I'd be okay with being Kevin Systrom. (Especially considering that Systrom is mostly unknown in the general public, whereas Zuck has a large amount of people who personally hate him.)

<comment><USER16> > /me looks at Wikipedia page of Kevin Systrom

>> Net worth: 1.6 billion $

Net worth of Mark Zuckerberg: 75.6 billion USD

> I think I'd be okay with being Kevin Systrom. (Especially considering that > Systrom is mostly unknown in the general public, whereas Zuck has a large > amount of people who personally hate him.)

I would probably make the same decision as Systrom, given the opportunity, but I don't think everyone would. Some people would rather be the new tech titan rather than the guy who sold himself out to keep the old tech titan in power for another decade.

There are also other motivations a found may have to not sell out to Zuckerberg. In my original comment considered including the WhatsApp founders. They both made out handsomely, but their creation will be corrupted to fit Zuckerberg's privacy-free vision rather than their privacy-preserving one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> While I still have a Facebook account I simply find myself using it less frequently. There is zero chance my engagement will ever increase. They have lost me and my views of their shitty advertising. And their advertising is complete crap. For a company focused on targeted ads they are absolutely terrible at it.

<comment><USER18> They have the data, so obviously they know more about the effects of their tweaks than I do, but:

It seems like I don't really get fresh content anymore. It seems like a few, mostly stale stories from people I barely talk to. That makes it harder to be engaged in the service, and it makes me use the service less.

What I wish I could have (by default) is just a chronological list of things that people have posted.

Maybe there is a team of facebook who needs to justify their jobs or something? I don't want my feed optimized at all. I do the optimizing by selecting who I follow.

<comment><USER19> > It seems like I don't really get fresh content anymore. It seems like a few, > mostly stale stories from people I barely talk to.

Perhaps what you're observing is the result of people abandoning Facebook or using it much less. It's not that Facebook is poorly optimized for you, it's that the people you want to hear from are using the platform less that before?

<comment><USER20> I totally agree with you, I decided to unfollow everyone and everything I don't want to keep contact with. It seems like I got rid of unfunny memes, photos of babies I don't care about, a lot of garbage posts from pages I don't even remember why I started following.

I thought I would get a better Facebook, a new feed with only posts from people I care about, turned out my Facebook is empty now, the people and pages I do care about seem to stopped posting a long time ago, I just didn't know because Facebook made it look like my feed was full of interactions I cared about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> And this is why Facebook bought Instagram. And in the future whatever they can acquire later. That is one strategy that can work in these situations. So younger people would not signup for Facebook and Instagram.

</comment><comment><USER22> Okay so, I'm reasonably well connected to the world.

What can Facebook offer me? I don't use it, I have never had an account, and I always thought it was a fad. It seems that it has taken awhile, but the world has agreed it was a fad and it is now over it.

So, what did I actually miss out on?

</comment><comment> brian-armstrong The article claims that life without Facebook is impossible. I haven't had an account for years and although I don't know what I'm missing, that statement seems exaggerated. Is this article more a reflection of the author's poor self control than of reality?

<comment><USER23> > The article claims that life without Facebook is impossible

Does it? This is the closest I can get:

> Facebook has been giving many people many reasons not to sign up over the > years. But we've had to: everyone we knew was on Facebook. And eventually, > this trickled up and our parents were on Facebook. Now the trickle down > effects of this are the opposite: kids don't want to be on Facebook because > it's what their parents are using.

That's not really the same as "impossible".

> Is this article more a reflection of the author's poor self control than of > reality?

Is poor self control the only reason one would be on Facebook?

<comment><USER24> >But we've had to: everyone we knew was on Facebook.

But the fact that everyone they know is on Facebook doesn't mean I have to be in Facebook. I never made an account for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Not sure I agree with this argument. If Facebook's appeal dips for prospective users, they'll just buy whatever services those users are using instead. Their revenue comes from ads anyway.

</comment><comment><USER26> > I'm talking looooonnnnggg time horizons here. Maybe a decade or more.

The life of a social moth. Always going for shining lights. Getting burnt. And having so low a life expectancy that 10 years is long-term.

</comment><comment><USER27> People are full of shit. Talk a big game when they benefit from it socially but when it comes to actually making a change, taking a stand, voting with dollars, etc. They come up with 'But I'm busy' 'But I'm tired' 'But I'm lonely' 'But everyone else is doing it' and the catch-all 'I'm only human'.

I'm guilty as charged too. I don't have a Facebook but I still eat fish, drive a car, etc, etc.

This trait right here is why I am not optimistic about the future no matter how much technology progresses.

<comment><USER28> If you think people are full of shit, you've been listening to the wrong ones.

Personally I never claimed that I will quit Facebook, because I know I ain't going to do it, as all my family is on it.

That said, I only visit Facebook about once per week or even less, because frankly it's not that interesting. I was also checking out my ads profile. Turns out, I _never clicked_ on any ads. And when posting content, I'm always careful to post for my friends only, which isn't a big list of people. Meaning that in the large scheme of things, Facebook isn't getting much from me. My social network of choice has been Twitter.

I also own two cars. But I ride my bike to and from work every day, in all seasons but winter.

I ate a lot of meat, but I'm trying to cut down on it due to health benefits. Considering that I gave up smoking, sodas and alcoholic beverages completely, it's a little hard for me to further restrict what I put in my mouth.

And yes, I am only human. FYI the actions of any one particular individual to cut down on usage based on moral or social factors are zilch. If you want meaningful change, there are only 3 ways to do it:

1\. invent technology that makes the status quo irrelevant, but this isn't actually something that most of us can do

2\. keep the competition alive by voting with your wallet, because every dollar counts

3\. get involved in politics, or at least talk more often with your representatives, go vote and convince the people around you to do the same

Because cutting down on meat due to environmental reasons, quitting Facebook and so on, that's the bullshit we do to feel good, but doesn't actually matter.

<comment><USER27> Cutting down on meat is good for a lot more than just feelin good my friend. I'm typing this from my phone, so I will just say do some more research on the benefits. There is a lot of byproducts directly from animal agriculture that affect quality of life for the entire biosphere.

Militant vegans do make it hard to listen at times but there are also other some other voices starting to speak up. Laboratory meats are probably going to be a monumental moment for the movement.

Moderation is key to everything. Facebook and most social media is built on feedloops that, in my opinion, stifle human potential. It'll will be looked back on one day like people view cigarettes today. I'll bet money on that.

I've gone through a crazy adventure through out my 20s to feel how I feel today. I feel healthy physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, spiritually, etc etc.

I'm kinda out there now, renouncing all my possessions besides one backpack, working on Option 1 in your list. I'm 28, first generation American</comment></comment></comment>