Concepts

Core concepts

• GKE overview

  Learn how Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) helps you run your containerized applications using Google infrastructure.

• Autopilot overview

  Learn about Autopilot clusters, where Google provisions and manages the cluster's underlying infrastructure, including nodes and node pools.

• GKE dashboards

  Learn how to use the Google Cloud console to manage your GKE resources.

• Kubernetes comic

  Learn, through an online comic, how to use Kubernetes for continuous integration and deployment.

Clusters

• Standard cluster architecture

  Learn about the parts of a Standard cluster: control planes, nodes, and more.

• Autopilot cluster architecture

  Learn about the parts of a cluster in Autopilot mode.

• Types of clusters

  Learn about the types of clusters that you can create and the differences among them.

• Private clusters

  Learn how private clusters work.

• VPC-native clusters

  Learn more about VPC-native clusters in GKE.

• Autopilot cluster upgrades

  Learn how automatic upgrades work for Autopilot clusters.

• Standard cluster upgrades

  Learn how automatic and manual upgrades work for Standard clusters and node pools.

• Node pool upgrade strategies

  Learn about the available node pool upgrade strategies in GKE.

• Maintenance windows and exclusions

  Learn how maintenance windows and exclusions provide control over when automatic maintenance, such as cluster and node auto-upgrades, can and cannot occur on your clusters.

• Compute classes in Autopilot

  Learn about the compute classes available in Autopilot to run Pods that have special hardware requirements, such as Arm architecture.

• Resource requests in Autopilot

  Learn about the default, minimum, and maximum resource quantities that you can request for your Autopilot Pods.

• Node pools

  Learn about node pools, which are a way to designate a subset of nodes within a cluster.

• Node images

  Learn about the OS image installed on GKE nodes, and what options are available.

• Containerd images

  Learn about the containerd OS images on GKE nodes, and what options are available.

• Regional clusters

  Learn how regional clusters work.

• Release channels

  Learn about release channels, which are a way to manage the versions of your clusters based on release stability.

• Alpha clusters

  Learn about alpha clusters, which are temporary clusters for testing Kubernetes alpha features.

• Cluster multi-tenancy

  Learn about the techniques that you can use to manage multi-tenant clusters.

• Cluster notifications

  Learn about how GKE publishes notifications about cluster events to Pub/Sub.

• About time-sharing GPUs

  Learn about time-sharing GPUs, which allow you to share physical GPUs with multiple workloads.

• TPUs

  Learn about using GKE to manage your Cloud TPU.

• Cluster autoscaler

  Learn how GKE can automatically scale the number of nodes in your cluster.

• Vertical Pod autoscaling

  Learn how to automatically update CPU and memory requests for containers.

• Spot VMs

  Learn about running fault-tolerant workloads at a lower price on Spot VMs.

Workloads on GKE

• Pod

  Learn about the Pod resource, which is the basic (and smallest) deployable unit in GKE.

• Deployment

  Learn about the Deployment resource, which represents a replicated, stateless application on your cluster.

• Custom and external metrics for autoscaling workloads

  Learn about custom and external metrics, and how you can automatically change the shape of your workloads.

• StatefulSet

  Learn about the StatefulSet resource, which represents a replicated, stateful application on your cluster.

• DaemonSet

  Learn about the DaemonSet resource, which deploys ongoing background tasks across nodes.

• ConfigMap

  Learn how to store and access non-sensitive configurations using Kubernetes ConfigMap resources.

Security

• Security overview

  Learn how to secure your GKE clusters.

• Shared responsibility

  Learn how Google shares responsibility with you for cluster security.

• Access control

  Learn about access control options available in GKE.

• Cluster trust

  Learn how your control plane, node, and etcd authenticate requests.

• GKE Sandbox

  Learn how GKE Sandbox protects the host kernel on your nodes when containers in the Pod execute unknown or untrusted code.

• Secrets

  Learn how to secure your sensitive information using Kubernetes Secret resources.

• Workload Identity

  Learn how to make authorized calls to Google Cloud APIs directly from clusters.

• Audit policy

  Learn how GKE specifies an audit logging policy.

• Control plane security

  Learn how the GKE control plane is secured.

• CIS Benchmarks

  Learn how to use the GKE CIS Benchmarks.

Networking

• Network overview

  Learn how networking works in GKE.

• Services

  Learn how Kubernetes Services work in GKE.

• Service networking overview

  Learn about the different methods you can use to expose your applications in GKE.

• GKE Dataplane V2

  Learn about this dataplane for GKE and Anthos clusters that is optimized for Kubernetes networking.

• IP masquerade in GKE

  Learn about IP masquerading in GKE.

• Container-native load balancing

  Learn about container-native load balancing in GKE.

• Ingress for GKE

  Learn about using Ingress for load balancing on Google Cloud.

• Ingress for External HTTP(S) Load Balancing

  Learn more about using Ingress with External HTTP(S) Load Balancing.

• Ingress for Internal HTTP(S) Load Balancing

  Learn more about using Ingress with Internal HTTP(S) Load Balancing.

• Gateway (Preview)

  Learn about the GKE implementation of the Kubernetes Gateway API.

• Gateway traffic management (Preview)

  Learn how Gateway traffic management works.

• Service discovery and DNS

  Learn how GKE provides service discovery and managed DNS.

• Automatically created firewall rules

  Learn more about the firewall rules that GKE creates and manages automatically.

• Multi-cluster Services

  Learn about using multi-cluster Services on GKE.

• Multi Cluster Ingress

  Learn about multi-cluster Ingress on Anthos.

Storage

• Storage overview

  Learn about the storage options available on GKE, including managed solutions and the Kubernetes storage abstractions.

• Volumes

  Learn about attaching storage resources to Pods.

• Persistent volumes and dynamic provisioning

  Learn about adding persistent storage resources to your cluster.

Logging and monitoring

• Overview of Google Cloud's operations suite for GKE

  Learn about the built-in integration of Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging in GKE.

Migrate workloads to GKE

• Migrate workloads to GKE

  Learn more about migrating existing workloads to GKE.

Arm workloads on GKE

• Arm workloads on GKE (Preview)

  Learn about using Arm nodes to run Arm workloads with GKE.

Windows Server on GKE

• Windows Server containers on GKE

  Learn more about using Windows Server containers on GKE.

GKE add-ons

• Add-on autoscaling

  Learn how the add-on resizer scales the resource requests and limits of the metrics-server and heapster add-ons.

• Application Delivery

  Learn how the Application Delivery add-on uses Git to deploy and manage applications on GKE.