Google Kubernetes Engine pricing

This page explains pricing for edition, compute resources, cluster operation mode, cluster management fees, and applicable ingress fees in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

Standard edition

Includes fully automated cluster lifecycle management, pod and cluster autoscaling, cost visibility and automated infrastructure cost optimization. Priced at $0.10 per cluster per hour.

Enterprise edition

Includes standard edition features and multi-team, multi-cluster, self-service operations, advanced security, service mesh, configuration, best practice observability metrics, and a unified console experience. Priced at $0.00822 per vCPU per hour.

Enabling GKE Enterprise in your project entitles you to full usage of the GKE Enterprise platform, including hybrid and multi-cloud features. Once enabled, GKE Enterprise charges apply to all managed GKE Enterprise clusters and are based on the number of GKE Enterprise cluster vCPUs, charged on an hourly basis. A vCPU is considered "under management" when it is seen as schedulable compute capacity by the GKE Enterprise control plane, meaning all vCPUs in the relevant user cluster, and excluding (for on-premises options) both the admin cluster and the control plane nodes. You can find out how to get the number of vCPUs in your user clusters in Understanding cluster capacity below. For details of available GKE Enterprise features in each environment see the deployment options guide.

Pricing table

GKE Enterprise offers pay-as-you-go pricing, where you are billed for GKE Enterprise managed clusters as you use them at the rates listed below. You can start using pay-as-you-go GKE Enterprise whenever you like by following the instructions in our setup guides.

Prices are listed in U.S. dollars (USD). If you pay in a currency other than USD, the prices listed in your currency on Cloud Platform SKUs apply. A bill is sent out at the end of each billing cycle, listing previous usage and charges.

Public Cloud Environments Pay-as-you-go
List Price (hourly)
Pay-as-you-go List
Price (monthly)M
GKE Enterprise GC $0.00822 /vCPU $6 / vCPU
GKE Enterprise Multicloud (AWS) AWS $0.00822 /vCPU $6 / vCPU
GKE Enterprise Multicloud (Azure) AZ $0.00822 /vCPU $6 / vCPU
GKE Enterprise Multicloud (Attached Clusters) AC $0.00822 /vCPU $6 / vCPU
On-premises Environments Pay-as-you-go (hourly) Pay-as-you-go (monthly)
Price (monthly)M
GDC (vSphere) $0.03288 / vCPU $24 / vCPU
GDC (Bare Metal) BM, BM2 $0.03288 / vCPU $24 / vCPU

M - Estimated monthly price based on 730 hours in a month.
GC - GKE Enterprise on Google Cloud pricing does not include charges for Google Cloud resources such as Compute Engine, Cloud Load Balancing, and Cloud Storage.
AWS - GKE Enterprise on AWS pricing does not include any costs associated with AWS resources such as EC2, ELB, and S3. The customer is responsible for any charges for their AWS resources.
AZ - GKE Enterprise on Azure pricing does not include any costs associated with Azure resources such as VMs, LBs, and Azure Storage. The customer is responsible for any charges for their Azure resources.
BM - For GKE Enterprise / GDC Virtual on bare metal, if hyperthreading is enabled one CPU is equivalent to two vCPUs for pricing purposes. If hyperthreading is not enabled, one CPU is equivalent to one vCPU.
BM2 - VM Runtime is a feature that can be enabled on GKE Enterprise / GDC Virtual on bare metal and it doesn't require an alternate SKU or additional pricing to be used.
AC - For CNCF compliant clusters - more.

If you are a new GKE Enterprise customer, you can try GKE Enterprise for free for a maximum of 90 days. You are still billed for applicable infrastructure usage during the trial. To sign up, go to the GKE Console and enable trial.

If at any time you want to stop using GKE Enterprise, follow the instructions in Disabling GKE Enterprise.

Autopilot mode

Autopilot clusters accrue a flat fee of $0.10/hour for each cluster after the free tier, plus the CPU, memory and ephemeral storage resources that are requested by your currently scheduled Pods as defined by the resources.requests fields in your Pod specification.

  • Autopilot applies default values to resources that are not defined in the Pod specification.

  • Pods are billed as general-purpose Pods, unless scheduled on a specific compute class.

  • Pod resources are subject to defined minimums, increments, and ratios of CPU to memory, and Autopilot will automatically round up values as needed to meet our requirements.

  • Autopilot only supports the Guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) class, where requests are equal to limits, burstable QoS support is not supported. Where resources.requests and resources.limits are both set, limits are ignored. Autopilot will set resources.requests values to resources.limits values in cases where limits are set and resources are not set. See Setting resource limits in Autopilot for examples.

  • You are not charged for system Pods, operating system overhead, unallocated space, or unscheduled Pods.

  • You are only billed for the resources requested by currently scheduled Pods. Scheduled pods are Pods in the Running phase, and those with the ContainerCreating status in the Pending phase. Pods in the Pending phase waiting to be scheduled (i.e. with a status other than ContainerCreating), and those in other phases like Succeeded and Failed are not billed.

  • All Autopilot resources are charged in 1 second increments, there is no minimum duration.

Committed use discounts for Autopilot clusters are available. With committed use discounts, you will receive 45% discount off on-demand pricing for a three-year commitment or 20% discount off on-demand pricing for a one-year commitment. These discounts are the same in every region. To learn more, see Committed use discounts in GKE .

GKE includes a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that's financially backed providing availability of 99.95% for the control plane of Autopilot clusters, and 99.9% for Autopilot pods in multiple zones.

General-purpose (default) Pods

If you pay in a currency other than USD, the prices listed in your currency on Cloud Platform SKUs apply.
*Spot prices are dynamic and can change up to once every 30 days, but always provide discounts of 60-91% off of the corresponding regular price for CPU, memory and GPU.
**To deliver a better default price-performance for applications, all GKE Autopilot clusters with control plane version 1.27.5 and later will use an SSD-based persistent disk for ephemeral storage. This change will only affect newly created clusters and new pods created in clusters upgraded to version 1.27.5 and later.

Scale-Out Compute Class Pods

If you pay in a currency other than USD, the prices listed in your currency on Cloud Platform SKUs apply.
*Spot prices are dynamic and can change up to once every 30 days, but always provide discounts of 60-91% off of the corresponding regular price for CPU, memory and GPU.

Balanced Compute Class Pods

If you pay in a currency other than USD, the prices listed in your currency on Cloud Platform SKUs apply.
*Spot prices are dynamic and can change up to once every 30 days, but always provide discounts of 60-91% off of the corresponding regular price for CPU, memory and GPU.

Performance Compute Class Premium

If you pay in a currency other than USD, the prices listed in your currency on Cloud Platform SKUs apply.
*Spot prices are dynamic and can change up to once every 30 days, but always provide discounts of 60-91% off of the corresponding regular price for CPU, memory and GPU.
Pods using the Performance compute class node selector are subject to Compute Engine pricing for the virtual machine, plus an Autopilot premium for the CPU, memory and storage resources.Refer to the Compute Engine pricing for the virtual machine price component. GCE CUDs apply to the Compute Engine charges, while Autopilot CUDs apply to the Autopilot charges.

GPU Pods

If you pay in a currency other than USD, the prices listed in your currency on Cloud Platform SKUs apply.
*Spot prices are dynamic and can change up to once every 30 days, but always provide discounts of 60-91% off of the corresponding regular price for CPU, memory and GPU.

Accelerator Compute Class Premium

If you pay in a currency other than USD, the prices listed in your currency on Cloud Platform SKUs apply.
*Spot prices are dynamic and can change up to once every 30 days, but always provide discounts of 60-91% off of the corresponding regular price for CPU, memory and GPU.
Autopilot GPU Pods using the Accelerator compute class node selector are subject to Compute Engine pricing for the virtual machine, plus an Autopilot premium for the GPU, CPU, memory and storage resources. Refer to the Compute Engine pricing for the virtual machine price component. Compute Engine CUDs apply to the Compute Engine charges, while Autopilot CUDs apply to the Autopilot charges.

Standard mode

Clusters created in Standard mode accrue a management fee of $0.10 per cluster per hour, irrespective of cluster size or topology, after the free tier. GKE cluster management fees do not apply to Anthos clusters.

In Standard mode, GKE uses Compute Engine instances worker nodes in the cluster. You are billed for each of those instances according to Compute Engine's pricing, until the nodes are deleted. Compute Engine resources are billed on a per-second basis with a one-minute minimum usage cost.

Compute Engine offers committed use discounts that apply to the Compute Engine instances in the cluster. To learn more, see Committed use discounts in Compute Engine .

GKE includes a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that's financially backed providing availability of 99.95% for the control plane of Regional clusters, and 99.5% for the control plane of Zonal clusters.

Cluster management fee and free tier

The cluster management fee of $0.10 per cluster per hour (charged in 1 second increments) applies to all GKE clusters irrespective of the mode of operation, cluster size or topology.

The GKE free tier provides $74.40 in monthly credits per billing account that are applied to zonal and Autopilot clusters. If you only use a single Zonal or Autopilot cluster, this credit will at least cover the complete cost of that cluster each month. Unused free tier credits are not rolled over, and cannot be applied to any other SKUs (for example, they cannot be applied to compute charges, or the cluster fee for Regional clusters).

The following conditions apply to the cluster management fee:

  • The fee is flat, irrespective of cluster size and topology—whether it is a single-zone cluster, multi-zonal cluster, regional or Autopilot cluster, all accrue the same flat fee per cluster.

  • The fee does not apply to GKE Enterprise clusters.

The following example demonstrates how the cluster management fee and free tier credit is applied for an organization’s billing accounts. In this example, the organization’s regional and zonal cluster hours are listed excluding Anthos clusters hours. The total billable amount is calculated per month, with the monthly free tier credit applied.

Organization's billing accounts Autopilot cluster hours per month Regional cluster hours per month Zonal cluster hours per month Free tier credit used Total monthly GKE cluster management fee
(at $0.10/hour per cluster)
account_1 744 0 0 $74.40 $0
account_2 0 1000 500 $50 $100
account_3 1000 1000 1000 $74.40 $225.60

Multi Cluster Ingress

Multi Cluster Ingress is included as part of GKE Enterprise, so there is no additional charge to use Multi Cluster Ingress in an GKE Enterprise on Google Cloud cluster. If you have GKE clusters that are not licensed for GKE Enterprise, you are billed at the standalone pricing rate when you use Multi Cluster Ingress. The functionality of Multi Cluster Ingress is the same whether you use it with GKE Enterprise licensing or standalone pricing. You can change how you are billed at any time by enrolling or unenrolling in GKE Enterprise.

In all cases, the load balancers and traffic for MultiClusterIngress resources are charged separately, according to load balancer pricing.

GKE Enterprise licensing

Multi Cluster Ingress is included as part of GKE Enterprise. If you enable the GKE Enterprise API (gcloud services enable anthos.googleapis.com) and your clusters are registered to a fleet, then there is no additional charge to use Multi Cluster Ingress.

Standalone pricing

Multi Cluster Ingress standalone pricing is based on the number of Pods that are considered Multi Cluster Ingress backends at a cost of $3 per backend Pod per month (730 hours). This pricing is approximately $0.0041096 per backend Pod per hour, billed in 5 minute increments.

The number of backend Pods is the total number of Pods that are members of MultiClusterService resources across all GKE clusters in your project. The following example shows how backend Pods are counted:

Multi Cluster Ingress pricing model

Multi Cluster Ingress only charges Pods which are direct backends of MultiClusterIngress resources. Pods which are not Multi Cluster Ingress backends are not charged. In this example, there are three MultiClusterService resources across two clusters with Pod backends. Pods that are members of Service A, B, and C are not direct backends and are not billed against the standalone pricing.

Any Pod that is a member of multiple MultiClusterService resources is billed for each MultiClusterService that they are a member of. Two Pods are members of both the D and E MultiClusterService.

The following table summarizes the monthly cost total for standalone billing for the two clusters in the example:

MultiClusterService Pods Cost per month
D 3 $9
E 4 $12
F 1 $3
Total 8 $24

For more information on how to configure Multi Cluster Ingress billing, see API enablement.

Backup for GKE

Backup for GKE is a separate service from GKE that can be used to protect and manage GKE data.

Backup for GKE accrues fees along two dimensions: first, there is a GKE backup management fee, based on the number of GKE pods protected, and second, there is a backup storage fee, based on the amount of data (GiB) stored. Both fees are calculated on a monthly basis, similar to other GKE feature billing.

As an example, a customer with a single backup plan in Iowa (us-central1) that backs up an average of 20 pods during a month, storing 200GiB of backup storage data in Iowa, would be charged $25.60 in fees. This $25.60 would include $20 for the month for GKE backup management (20 x $1.00 / pod-month) and $5.60 for backup storage (200 * $0.028 / GiB-month).

Starting June 26 2023, new network outbound data transfer charges will be introduced for backups that are stored in a different region from their source GKE cluster. These charges will be based on the source and destination region and the number of bytes transferred for each such "cross-region" backup operation:

GKE cluster location Backup location
Northern America Europe Asia Indonesia Oceania Middle East Latin America
Northern America $0.02/GiB $0.05/GiB $0.08/GiB $0.10/GiB $0.10/GiB $0.11/GiB $0.14/GiB
Europe $0.05/GiB $0.02/GiB $0.08/GiB $0.10/GiB $0.10/GiB $0.11/GiB $0.14/GiB
Asia $0.08/GiB $0.08/GiB $0.08/GiB $0.10/GiB $0.10/GiB $0.11/GiB $0.14/GiB
Indonesia $0.10/GiB $0.10/GiB $0.10/GiB N/A $0.08/GiB $0.11/GiB $0.14/GiB
Oceania $0.10/GiB $0.10/GiB $0.10/GiB $0.08/GiB $0.08/GiB $0.11/GiB $0.14/GiB
Middle East $0.11/GiB $0.11/GiB $0.11/GiB $0.11/GiB $0.11/GiB $0.08/GiB $0.14/GiB
Latin America $0.14/GiB $0.14/GiB $0.14/GiB $0.14/GiB $0.14/GiB $0.14/GiB $0.14/GiB

Pricing calculator

You can use the Google Cloud pricing calculator to estimate your monthly GKE charges, including cluster management fees and worker node pricing.

What's next

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