About GKE on Bare Metal

GKE on Bare Metal, a component of Google Distributed Cloud Virtual (GDC Virtual), is software that brings Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to your on-premises data centers. With GKE on Bare Metal, you can create, manage, and upgrade Kubernetes clusters on your own hardware in your own data center.

Why GKE on Bare Metal?

GKE on Bare Metal takes advantage of your existing enterprise infrastructure, and helps you modernize applications throughout their lifecycle.

Bring your own node

GKE on Bare Metal lets you deploy applications directly on your own hardware infrastructure, so it can deliver the best performance and flexibility.

Because you are using your own hardware and network, you have direct control over application scale, security, and network latency, as well as having the benefit of containerized applications through Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and GKE Enterprise components.

Improved performance and lowered cost

GKE on Bare Metal manages application deployment and health across existing corporate data centers for more efficient operation, and at the edge of the network, so analytic apps can run with full performance.

Without a virtual machine, GKE on Bare Metal can also manage application containers on a wide variety of performance optimized hardware types, like GPUs, and allows for direct application access to hardware.

Compatible security

Because you control your node environment, you can optimize your network, hardware, and applications to meet your specific requirements. As a result, you can directly control system security, without having to worry about your compatibility with virtual machines and operating systems.

Monitored application deployment

GKE on Bare Metal provides advanced monitoring of the health and performance of your environment, so you can more easily scale up applications while maintaining reliability despite fluctuations in workload and network traffic.

You manage monitoring, logging, and analysis of clusters and workloads through Connect.

Network latency and flexibility

Because you manage your network requirements, your network can be optimized for low latency, and this can be crucial for performance in commercial or finance analytics, as well as other enterprise or network edge applications.

Highly available

GKE on Bare Metal includes support for multiple control nodes in a cluster, so if a master node goes down you can still administer your environment.

Secure design and control

Your infrastructure security can be customized for your own needs, with minimal connections to outside resources. Most importantly, there is no additional VM complexity when deploying security systems, and you maintain complete OS transparency when interacting with existing security systems.

GKE on Bare Metal also works with lightweight secure connections to Google APIs, and allows you to manage clusters and applications from a central place with Connect and Cloud Monitoring. This centralization also helps keep your deployments running smoothly, and lets Google support troubleshoot issues more effectively.

Preflight checks on installation

GKE on Bare Metal runs on open source and enterprise Linux systems, and on a minimal hardware infrastructure, and so is flexible in your environment. GKE on Bare Metal also includes a variety of pre-flight checks to help ensure successful configurations and installations.

Application deployment and load balancing

GKE on Bare Metal includes Layer 4 and Layer 7 load balancing mechanisms at cluster creation.

Improved etcd reliability

To monitor the size and defragment etcd databases, GKE on Bare Metal control planes include an etcddefrag pod to reclaim storage from large etcd databases and recover etcd when disk space is exceeded.