We are nowhere near this stage yet but to me I would think if we have one customer with something small versus another with a very large setup the pricing should vary.  Have to wait and see when we get to that point.

@patricio.rcm , @Yongkang , @Geoff Burke 

To me it feels like the concept of instances with the VUL was perfect for this. You’d charge less per instance vs a VM potentially as you’re likely to have multiple containers doing the work of 1 VM. (Thinking small internal apps that can sit on a single WAMP/LAMP instance).

But that’s at a simplistic view, and I’m conscious there are projects such as containerised VMs that could screw it all up!

Licensing is always a matter of discussion for any solution, and that also applies for Kasten.  Currently indeed the licensing mode is to license all worker nodes in a Kubernetes cluster, regardless the size or the workloads running on those workers.  I’m not in the Kasten team, so I can’t provide any accurate feedback regarding to further modifications in how the solution is licensed.

Anyway, it’s important to remember that Kasten provides a free license for small environments (whether for production workloads or not) with up to 5 worker nodes, with all Kasten features included.  Of course no support from Kasten is provided, and in case the customer needs to scale beyond those 5 nodes, then they need an enterprise license for ALL workers.

So for customer in the beginning of their K8s journey, they can start with this free edition, and of course it’s important to take good design decisions from scale perspective.  For instance, it doesn’t make sense to have a large cluster with many workers, if we have a small number of workloads running on it.  I would recommend to start with a small cluster and scale up/out if the number of workloads require more resources.  Remember that the Kasten license is applied to workers regardless the worker size, so a large worker node is going to consume the same license as a small node, so having too small worker nodes will be quite more expensive from licensing perspective.

BTW, as far as I know, Service Providers should contact directly with Kasten sales team, as of course the Service Provider’s business model is quite different as a normal customer.  Not sure what would be the difference for licensing, but there is a distinction between Service Providers and end-customers.

Service provider are not allowed to use the community licenses or to give services upon them…

Talk to Veeam / Kasten guys, there’s a special license for small environments (I recall up to 4 cpu, 16g  memory) doesn’t have to be service provider. @JMeixner 

Thank you all for your replies,

I was perhaps unclear. My company IS a service provider, so, we are not allowed to use the free licenses. And I have talked already with the Hosting team in Germany about this.

I wanted to get an opinion from other service providers all over the world.

This has been an interesting topic especially being an SP and knowing options when we start to support this.

As @Yongkang  said best to talk to Kasten about it, i.e. getting a small lic or something.

Right now the Service Provider area is still in its infancy at Kasten/Veeam. It is a work in progress.

That’s the point why I want to collect some ideas from the service providers
I speak every week with Veeam sales about this…

There are no small licenses for service providers for Kasten - every worker nodes costs 225 license points at the moment. That’s it.

Maybe @GatienGHEZA  could give his opinion about the subject :)