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.