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If you are on GKE v1.27, expect to pay 500% more for your clusters next month.
Why? Last week, GKE launched extended support for clusters not upgraded by the standard support deadline.
Basically, GKE has adopted the support model that Amazon EKS extended support and Azure AKS Long-Term Support (LTS) have already normalized.
Here are the key things you need to know about GKE extended support:
If you are on v1.27, expect your GKE bill to be 6X higher next month: This is how much you can expect to pay based on the size of your GKE fleet:
You can’t opt out. GKE extended support surcharges will be charged automatically: GKE extended support surcharges are applicable to all release channels: rapid, regular and stable.
Your clusters won’t be auto-upgraded while in extended support: GKE customers that we work with are generally terrified that GKE will auto-upgrade their clusters. Now with extended support, auto-upgrades won’t happen for an additional 10 months after end of standard support, which is a good thing.
Chkk has helped many GKE, EKS, and AKS customers with their Kubernetes upgrades. Upgrading Kubernetes clusters and add-ons is a complex, error-prone, and time-consuming process. Currently, teams spend weeks researching unknown dependencies and discovering incompatibilities, followed by extensive efforts to seek approvals, notify team members, and address API deprecations and removals with application teams. They then carefully execute upgrades across development, staging, and production environments to avoid disruptions.
Chkk creates a comprehensive and up-to-date upgrade technical specification for a cluster, its add-ons, and associated infrastructure components. The Preverified Upgrade Plan, contextualized to the current state, provides a detailed description of the changes, the reasons behind them, and the recommended upgrade path. It lists the current versions and configurations of the control plane, nodes, IAM roles, all add-ons, deprecated and removed APIs, and other application and cloud dependencies. It also suggests recommended versions and configurations, including relevant release notes and references back to the sources. This approach reduces research time by up to 75%, cutting down weeks of preparation work to days.
The Preverified Upgrade Plan also contains a detailed sequence of steps that standardizes the upgrade process and allows experts to delegate individual tasks. Chkk also verifies these steps on a digital twin of your infrastructure, executing the prescribed sequence to validate that the plan works as expected. Each step is accompanied by automated preflight and post-flight checks to validate the correctness and health of the system, de-risking the upgrade process. With Chkk, you perform timely and safe upgrades, resulting in better conformity, fewer incidents, lower operational loads, improved team productivity, and 1000s of hours saved in post-incident break-fix work.
