Google Distributed Cloud is software that brings Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to on-premises data centers. With Google Distributed Cloud, you can create, manage, and upgrade Kubernetes clusters in your on-premises environment.
With Connect, you can view and sign in to your on-premises and on-cloud Kubernetes clusters from the same interface in the Google Cloud console.
Google Distributed Cloud runs in your data center in a vSphere environment. vSphere is VMware's server virtualization software. Google Distributed Cloud uses VMware's vCenter Server to manage your clusters.
Getting Google Distributed Cloud
Google Distributed Cloud is a core component of GKE Enterprise.
Installing Google Distributed Cloud
Before you install Google Distributed Cloud, you create an admin workstation virtual machine (VM) instance in your vSphere environment. You then use the admin workstation to install Google Distributed Cloud.
Architecture
Google Distributed Cloud includes an admin cluster and one or more user clusters, as well as an admin workstation VM. All of these VMs run in a single vSphere cluster.
Admin cluster
The admin cluster is the base layer of Google Distributed Cloud. It runs the following Google Distributed Cloud components:
Admin cluster control plane. The admin cluster's control plane includes the Kubernetes API server, the scheduler, and several controllers for the admin cluster.
User cluster control planes. For each user cluster, the admin cluster has a node that runs the control plane for the user cluster. The control plane includes the Kubernetes API server, the scheduler, and several controllers for the user cluster.
Add-ons. The admin cluster runs several Kubernetes add-ons, like Grafana, Prometheus, and Google Cloud Observability. Google Distributed Cloud launches add-ons on different admin cluster nodes than other control plane components.
Note that user control planes are managed by the admin cluster. They run on nodes in the admin cluster, not in the user clusters. In addition, nodes in the admin cluster run Google Distributed Cloud components. User workloads do not run in the admin cluster.
User cluster
User clusters are where you deploy and run your containerized workloads and services.
Versioning
To learn about Google Distributed Cloud versions, see Version history.
Additional GKE Enterprise components
With Google Distributed Cloud, you can also use the following GKE Enterprise components: