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Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
Google's battle-tested managed Kubernetes with the industry's best autoscaling.
0Free-Limited
Container Orchestration Cloud Platform Managed Kubernetes
Overview
GKE is a managed Kubernetes service by Google Cloud, offering advanced orchestration and autoscaling.
Key Features
- Autopilot mode: fully managed, serverless Kubernetes with per-pod billing
- Workload Identity for secure, keyless pod-to-GCP service authentication
- Vertical and Horizontal Pod Autoscaling with Node Auto Provisioning
- Binary Authorization for enforcing image signature policies
- Config Sync (Flux-based GitOps) built into GKE Enterprise
- Anthos for hybrid and multi-cloud cluster management
Real-World Workflows
Autopilot cluster for a stateless web application
- 1Create a GKE Autopilot cluster — no node management required
- 2Deploy the application using a Kubernetes Deployment and Service
- 3Configure Horizontal Pod Autoscaler for traffic-based scaling
- 4Expose with a Google-managed load balancer and Cloud Armor WAF
- 5Use Cloud Monitoring for metrics and Cloud Logging for container logs
CI/CD with GCP Cloud Build and GKE
- 1Cloud Build triggers on a push to the source repository
- 2Build and push the image to Artifact Registry
- 3Cloud Deploy creates a release and deploys to GKE staging cluster
- 4After approval, Cloud Deploy promotes the release to production GKE cluster
Getting Started
gcloud container clusters create-auto my-cluster \ --region us-central1 gcloud container clusters get-credentials my-cluster \ --region us-central1 kubectl get nodes
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