Explore your cluster and workload

View and learn about the some of the workload settings and resources that you deployed in one of our quickstarts.

This follow-up tutorial delves deeper into some Kubernetes concepts such as Pods and Services, though doesn't assume that you have previous Kubernetes experience.

To follow step-by-step guidance for this task directly in the Google Cloud console, click Guide me:

Guide me

Before you begin

Ensure that you've followed the steps in one of these quickstarts to create a cluster and deploy a sample app:

View Pod details

In Kubernetes, a Pod is the smallest deployable unit of computing that you can create and manage. Like all Kubernetes workloads, the sample application deployment consists of Pods (in this case, one Pod with no additional replicas) wrapping containerized applications (in this case, one container). In this section, we'll take a look at what you can learn in the Google Cloud console about the sample app's Pod.

  1. First, ensure that you're on the sample app's Deployment details page (you might still be there if you've just finished the previous tutorial). If you're not on that page:

    1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the GKE Workloads page.

      Go to Workloads

    2. In the Name column, click the name of the app you deployed, hello-world-app (if you deployed with the Google Cloud console) or example-hello-app-deployment (for the Terraform deployment).

  2. In the Overview tab, you can view more details about the sample app workload, including:

    • Replicas: The number of Pod replicas that are currently running in your workload.

    • Pod specification: The version of this Deployment, and the sample app's container.

  3. The Managed pods table links to configuration data and performance metrics for each running Pod replica.

View Services

A Kubernetes Service is how you provide networking endpoints for a Pod or Pods. When you deployed your workload, you created a load balancing Service that directs external traffic to your workload. This Service is what let you access the sample app's web interface after you deployed the application.

To view your workload's Service:

  1. Go to the Exposing services table in the Deployment details page. This shows you any Services that your workload exposes.

  2. In the Name column of the Exposing services table, click the name of the example app's Service. The name is hello-world-app-service if you deployed the app in the Google Cloud console or example-hello-app-loadbalancer if you deployed with Terraform.

  3. In the Service details page, you can learn more about the Service, including:

    • The Service's external endpoints: the IP address or addresses that you can use to access the Service. You used this IP address to visit the app's web interface in the previous quickstart.
    • The ports the Service uses.
    • More details about the service's load balancer, including the cluster IP address that the load balancer sends traffic to. You can click the load balancer name to find even more information, such as its frontend and backend details.

What's next