Bahriya Kubernetes Engine
USD 12,000 a year, per cluster. Not per core, not per socket, not per node. Add capacity and the licence does not move.
A worked example
A mid-sized production cluster, sized the way most of ours are: 3 control-plane nodes for quorum, 8 workers carrying the load.
| Nodes | Each | vCPU | Memory | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Control plane | 3 | 36 vCPU / 64 GB | 108 | 192 GB |
| Workers | 8 | 36 vCPU / 64 GB | 288 | 512 GB |
| Total | 11 | — | 396 | 704 GB |
BKE licenses this cluster for USD 12,000 a year. It licenses a cluster half the size for USD 12,000 a year, and a cluster four times the size for USD 12,000 a year.
Comparing like with like
The established enterprise distributions — Red Hat OpenShift, VMware Tanzu — are licensed per core, on a subscription. To compare them with a flat fee you have to put both in the same unit, so here is ours divided out.
We do not publish their rates, and you should distrust anyone who does. Both are negotiated per customer, and the number on a price list is rarely the number on a contract. The figure worth comparing is the one on the quote in front of you.
| BKE, expressed as | On this cluster | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Per worker core, per year | USD 83.33 | 144 physical cores, if your 36 vCPUs are 18 hyperthreaded cores |
| Per worker vCPU, per year | USD 41.67 | 288 worker vCPUs |
| Per core, all nodes | USD 60.61 | 198 cores, if your agreement counts control-plane nodes too |
| Per node, per year | USD 1,091 | 11 nodes |
Take the rate you have been quoted, multiply by your core count, and compare it with USD 12,000. That is the whole comparison, and it needs nothing from us that you cannot check.
| If your quoted rate is | 144 worker cores cost | Against BKE |
|---|---|---|
| USD 100 / core / year | USD 14,400 | 1.2× |
| USD 200 / core / year | USD 28,800 | 2.4× |
| USD 300 / core / year | USD 43,200 | 3.6× |
| USD 400 / core / year | USD 57,600 | 4.8× |
| USD 500 / core / year | USD 72,000 | 6.0× |
Illustrative rates, not anybody’s price list. Substitute your own.
The part that compounds
The comparison above is a snapshot. The difference that matters shows up the day you add capacity, because a per-core licence grows with the cluster and a flat fee does not.
| Workers | Worker cores | BKE | At USD 300 / core |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | 72 | USD 12,000 | USD 21,600 |
| 8 | 144 | USD 12,000 | USD 43,200 |
| 16 | 288 | USD 12,000 | USD 86,400 |
| 32 | 576 | USD 12,000 | USD 172,800 |
At 4 workers BKE is USD 167 a core. At 32 it is USD 21 a core. Nothing about the licence changed; the cluster did.
Honestly
Four things to check before you put any of the above in a business case. Every one of them can move the number by a factor of two.
With hyperthreading, 36 vCPUs is 18 physical cores. Per-core licensing is usually counted in physical cores, so getting this backwards halves or doubles the comparison. Confirm which your quote means.
Control-plane and infrastructure nodes are often excluded, and sometimes are not. That is a term of your agreement rather than a fact about the software, which is why both bases are shown above.
USD 12,000 licenses the software. It does not include us operating your cluster or an incident-response commitment — those are a support and maintenance contract, priced separately. A vendor subscription often bundles them, so compare the whole line.
A licence is bound to one control-plane endpoint. Four clusters is four licences. If you run many small clusters rather than a few large ones, a flat fee is the less favourable shape and we would rather say so.