GKE is free! All jokes aside, all of the management, operations, monitoring, and configuration functionality that we've covered in this chapter really is free. GKE is billed based on the utilization of the underlying supporting resources. The bulk of your utilization, and therefore billing, will come from the underlying GCE VM instances.
In your billing summary and transaction list, you will usually see line items like the following for GKE workloads:
- Compute Engine Storage
- Compute Engine Static IP
- Compute Engine Network Load Balancing
- Compute Engine Instances
It's outside of the scope of this chapter, but one thing that you will find useful is the ability to export your utilization/billing information to BigQuery and then analyze/monitor your budget organized by label. Labeling the resources associated with individual workloads is a great way to organize,...
