I'm new to GKE, and tried to create a "normal" 3-node cluster using n16-high-cpu in the us-central-1a region. It took 2 1/2 minutes to 3 minutes -- is that the expected startup time? I was hoping it would be more like 60 to 75 seconds due to this link: https://medium.com/google-cloud/improving-gce-boot-times-with-custom-images-f77921a2c115 Also, AWS seems to imply about a 60 second startup time (AWS EC2 Instance starting time), so I assumed GCE/GKE would be competitive
Also, are we charged for the ~3 minutes of "booting up" the VMs, or the billing only start after the machines are "fully up and running" (ie one can ssh into them etc.) If the "boot time is charged", then I guess there's always a "minimum overhead" cost to every GKE/GCE instance (which is fine -- I just need to know that it does exist and what is the expected time/cost overhead.) (Similarily, I just noticed that it takes on the order of minutes (instead of seconds) to resize a node pool to 0, so are we charge during this "shutting down/ resizing time"? (Why does it take on the order of mintues instead of seconds to resize to 0, ie shutdown every node?)
~ 3 minutes can make sense. The master node needs to be provisioned, followed by the Managed instance group and the instance template, followed by the desired number of VMs to serve as nodes. Once all these are in place, your VPC needs to be updated with secondary ranges, firewall rules and routes. And finally, your master node needs to establish a SSH tunnel to each node and sync up with the kubelet and confirm they are ready to use.
As to the charges, you are billed per resource as they spin up and become ready, while the cluster is being created, you are not billed. Billing will start once the cluster create operation is completed and the cluster becomes ready.