Regional vs. zonal GKE clusters: making the right choice for your workloads

May 29, 2025: This post was updated to clarify the distinctions between control-plane and worker-node replication, as well as the implications for reliability and costs. 

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) empowers businesses to efficiently orchestrate, manage, and scale containerized applications within Google Cloud. When designing your GKE environment, a pivotal decision arises: selecting between a regional or zonal cluster. This choice can impact your application's availability, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. In this blog post, we delve into the characteristics and considerations associated with each cluster type to guide you toward an informed decision.

Understanding the fundamentals

The primary distinction between regional and zonal clusters lies in the distribution of their control planes and the default distribution of nodes. While you can’t change a cluster between regional or zonal after cluster creation, you can change the distribution of the nodes at any time.

Regional clusters provide superior resilience by replicating the control plane (which oversees cluster operations) across multiple zones within a region. Worker nodes (which execute your workloads) are also, by default, distributed across multiple zones within the region.

Zonal clusters host the single control plane in a single zone and, by default, keep worker nodes within the same zone inside a region.

For both cluster types you can distribute worker nodes across multiple zones for added fault tolerance or confine them to a single zone for reduced inter-zone networking costs.

Choosing the right cluster type and worker node distribution is crucial for success with GKE. Let's dive into these key concepts to guide your decision-making process.

Key considerations for your decision

High availability requirements

High availability is the most significant aspect when choosing between regional and zonal GKE clusters.

Regional clusters are designed for maximum uptime, as regional clusters spread their control plane across multiple zones, and worker nodes, by default, run in multiple zones. If one zone becomes unavailable, other zones ensure your control plane remains operational, minimizing service disruptions.

Zonal clusters can be more vulnerable to outages, as the control plane runs within one zone, and the worker nodes also, by default, run within one zone. If the zone where your cluster resides experiences a failure, both the control plane and worker nodes (residing in the same zone) could be disrupted, leading to potential application downtime.

High availability is often mission-critical. Regional clusters are the preferred choice for production workloads where downtime is unacceptable.

Scalability needs

When it comes to accommodating scaling requirements, regional clusters provide much higher scalability limits and are able to handle up to 15,000 nodes per cluster. For zonal clusters, we don’t recommend these clusters to scale beyond 2,000 nodes (see Quotas and limits).

When it comes to node distribution, hosting your worker nodes in a single zone can lead to resource limitations, especially during traffic spikes. Multi-zone node placement offers multi-zone resource pools that provide greater capacity to handle large-scale workloads and unpredictable scaling demands.

Essentially, if you expect large-scale workloads or significant fluctuations in demand, regional clusters with multi-zone node placement offer greater flexibility and the ability to scale more gracefully.

Cost considerations

Both cluster types share a similar pricing structure with the same cluster management fee applied to both. The management fee of your first zonal cluster is covered by the GKE free tier so this is a great way to start your experience with GKE. 

With both cluster types you can distribute your worker nodes across multiple zones. This approach is better for reliability but may incur costs related to cross-zone network traffic between the worker nodes distributed across multiple zones.

The bottom line is: regional clusters offer superior availability and scalability at the same price as zonal clusters. 

Updates and maintenance

Update and maintenance considerations can significantly influence the choice between zonal and regional clusters.

Regional clusters provide enhanced resilience during such operations. With regional clusters, when you make updates to the control plane, access to the control plane remains available because the control plane is replicated. Workloads are not impacted by control plane updates.

Zonal clusters’ control plane is not available during updates as the control plane is not replicated. With zonal clusters, when you make updates to the control plane, access to the control plane is temporarily unavailable. Workloads continue to run, however you can't make any changes that require access to the cluster until the control plane update is finished.

Decision-making

Here's a table summarizing the key points we've discussed, making decision-making a bit easier:

Typical use cases

Below are the typical use-cases for regional and zonal clusters:

Regional clusters:

• Production-grade, mission-critical applications requiring maximum uptime

• Large-scale applications with dynamic scaling needs

Zonal clusters:

• Development/testing environments where high availability is not the top priority

• Low-traffic or non-critical applications

Conclusion

Regional clusters offer maximum availability and resilience, making them ideal for mission-critical applications and large-scale deployments. Zonal clusters allow you to create your own reliability solution using Google Cloud zones as building blocks or start your journey with GKE using free tier credits.

Besides choosing the optimal cluster type, it is important to remember to correctly configure the worker node distribution across zones in order to ensure reliability of your applications.

Choosing the optimal configuration depends entirely on your specific architecture, uptime requirements, and budget. Carefully weigh these trade-offs to ensure your GKE deployment seamlessly supports your application's needs.

Need more information? Explore the official Google Cloud documentation for more in-depth guidance:

• Creating clusters: Creating a regional cluster | Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

• Choosing a cluster architecture: About cluster configuration choices | Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)