Moderate to move
GKE on Akamai (Linode): what it becomes and what it costs.
On Akamai (Linode), GKE becomes Linode Kubernetes Engine (LKE). Manifests stay the same; the control plane becomes yours on Hetzner, or the destination’s managed Kubernetes elsewhere. Autopilot pod vCPU / RAM is billed on this line, so part of it is compute.
Effort grade
Moderate
Same software, self-hosted: you patch, back up and fix it
Cost after the move, before engineer time
40% of today
$0.10/h = $73/mo per cluster plus, on Autopilot, pod vCPU at $0.0445/h; the cluster fee becomes three CX23 (€16.5) and pods become servers at list price, about 40%.
Engineer time
6 h a month
To run the replacement: patching, backups, on-call. Plus about 5 engineer days for the move itself.
Your own GKE line, from your export
Drop one month of your Google Cloud cost export and the report prices every service, GKE included, on Akamai (Linode) list prices of 18 Oct 2026, net of the engineer time to run it. In your browser; nothing is uploaded.