Compute

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

Managed Kubernetes — the most mature K8s offering in any cloud

AWS equivalent

EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service)

KubernetesContainersManaged

Architecture Diagram

GKE Cluster Architecture

🔄

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Google invented Kubernetes — GKE has the deepest integration and releases new K8s features first.
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GKE Autopilot: Google manages nodes, node pools, scaling — you just deploy workloads. Much simpler than EKS node group management.
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Upgrade experience: GKE can auto-upgrade cluster and nodes with minimal disruption. EKS upgrades are more manual.
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Workload Identity: GCP service account mapped directly to K8s service account — no need for node IAM roles like in EKS.

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1
Two modes: Standard (you manage nodes, GKE manages control plane) and Autopilot (GKE manages everything).
2
Node pools: groups of nodes with the same config. Mix CPU/GPU/preemptible nodes in one cluster.
3
Cluster Autoscaler: automatically adds/removes nodes based on pending pods.
4
Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) and Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) built in.
5
GKE Ingress integrates with Cloud Load Balancing. Services of type LoadBalancer get a Google Cloud LB.
6
Anthos: extend GKE management to on-prem and multi-cloud. Only GCP has this level of hybrid K8s.

💡

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Recommend GKE for complex microservice architectures, stateful workloads, teams already using Kubernetes, workloads needing fine-grained resource control.
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GKE vs Cloud Run: 'Cloud Run is simpler and cheaper for stateless HTTP services. GKE is better when you need full Kubernetes capabilities, stateful workloads, or multi-container pods.'
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Mention Anthos when a customer has multi-cloud or hybrid requirements — it's a genuine GCP differentiator.

⚠️

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GKE control plane has a small hourly cost. Autopilot includes this.
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Persistent volumes in GKE use Persistent Disks — zonal by default. Use regional PDs for HA.
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Binary Authorization: enforce that only signed, approved container images run in your cluster.