Google Kubernetes Engine: 7 Years And 7 Amazing Benefits

Today, as we celebrate seven years of general availability of the most automated and scalable managed Kubernetes, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), we present seven of the common ways that GKE helps customers do amazing things.

Accelerates productivity of developers

Developer time is at a premium. GKE provides a rich set of integrated tools to help you ship faster and more often. The practice of continuous integration (CI) allows developers to frequently integrate all their code changes back into a main branch, exposing failures faster by revealing issues as early as possible in the process. A CI pipeline typically produces an artifact that you can deploy in later stages of the deployment process with continuous delivery (CD). CD lets you release code at any time.

The ecosystem of developer tools for GKE spans across CI and CD.

• Developers write, deploy, and debug code faster with Cloud Code and Cloud Shell
• Continuously integrate and deliver updates with Cloud Build
• Continuous delivery to GKE is made easier, faster, and more reliable with Cloud Deploy
• Debug and troubleshoot with Google Cloud’s operations suite
• You can use your favorite partner solutions out of the box

Moreover, GKE Autopilot cluster accelerates app deployment reducing configuration time and simplifies ongoing management of Dev/Test clusters. You can read more on how to get started with GKE Autopilot.

“Google Kubernetes Engine is easy to configure, and scales really well. That means the developers don’t need to think about managing it in production, they can simply set the parameters and be confident it will work.”—Vincent Oliveira, CTO, Lucky Cart

Bolsters security into software supply chain

Security remains a top of mind for all organizations. Kubernetes clusters created in the Autopilot mode implement many GKE hardening features by default. Furthermore, GKE Autopilot improves cluster security, restricting access to the Kubernetes API, prevents node mutation, enforcing robust security posture, and lets you implement additional guidance to harden security of your clusters. Binary Authorization is a deploy-time security control that ensures only trusted container images are deployed on GKE. With Binary Authorization, you can gain tighter control over your container environment by ensuring only verified images are integrated into the build-and-release process. You can read more on how to build security into your software supply chain

“We needed to be HIPAA compliant, which was going to be painful on AWS, and we wanted to get away from managing and operating our own Kubernetes clusters,” recalled Astorino. “We had heard good things about GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine). And particularly valuable for us, — many technical requirements you need for HIPAA compliance are configured by default on Google Cloud.” —Troy Astorino, CoFounder & CTO of PicnicHealth

Creates new opportunities with a platform approach

Modern application platforms spawn creativity and drive quick response to customer demands.  GKE customers use Kubernetes to build a modern enterprise-grade application platform for their organization. With the ability to achieve improved speed and performance for a variety of workloads through Tau VMs/GPU/TPU/Local SSD support, GKE helps them support a wide variety of containerized applications, including stateful and stateless, AI and ML, Linux and Windows. Only GKE can run 15,000 node clusters, outscaling other cloud providers by up to 10X, letting you run applications effectively and reliably at scale.

“Google Cloud-managed services are playing a major role in enabling Noon.com customers to get their shopping done whenever they need it, without experiencing any delays or glitches, and without us having to lose sleep at night to ensure our platform is functioning as it should.”—Alex Nadalin, SVP of Engineering, Noon.com

Delivers always-on experiences for customers

Consumers today demand 24×7 digital experiences. GKE provides granular controls to deliver always-on, highly available, and reliable apps and services. With node auto-upgrade we automatically upgrade and patch your cluster nodes, while the control plane is always patched and upgraded by Google. You can also subscribe to a release channel – rapid, regular or stable – based on your needs and constraints. For enterprises, release channels provide the level of predictability needed for advanced planning, and the flexibility to orchestrate custom workflows automatically when a change is scheduled. You can learn more about release channels here, and about maintenance windows here.

“To bring E.ON Optimum to market, we needed to transform in-house software into a highly scalable, reliable cloud-based solution. We were specifically looking for a cloud partner capable of running Kubernetes pods at scale and 100% of the time, and that led us to Google Cloud.”—Dennis Nobel, Digital Delivery Manager, E.ON

Enables cost optimization and savings for organizations

In the current macroeconomic environment, you often need to do more with fewer resources. GKE Autopilot dynamically adjusts compute resources, so there’s no need to figure out what size and shape nodes you should configure for your workloads. With GKE Autopilot, you pay only for the pods you use and you’re billed per second for vCPU, memory and disk resource requests. Moreover, GKE cost optimization insights help you discover optimization opportunities at scale, across your GKE clusters and workloads, automatically with minimal friction.

“Since migrating to GKE, we’ve halved the costs of running our nodes, reduced our maintenance work, and gained the ability to scale up and down effortlessly and automatically according to demand. All our customer production loads and development environment run on GKE, and we’ve never faced a critical incident since.”—Helge Rennicke, Director of Software Development, Market Logic Software

Fuels growth with focus on business innovation

IT divisions are moving from cost centers to value centers by using managed cloud services. One can benefit from no-stress management and focus on business innovation using GKE Autopilot, which provides hands-off cluster management, SLA and eliminates most day-2 cluster operations.

GKE delivers most dimensions of automation to efficiently and easily operate your applications. With fully managed GKE Autopilot,  combined with multi-dimensional auto-scaling capabilities, you can get started with a production ready secured cluster in minutes and have complete control over the configurations and maintenance.

”The automated features of Google Kubernetes Engine enables us to manage app traffic and develop games at an amazingly high level of efficiency. Currently, we only need two engineers to monitor traffic volume and all the environments of our three games, which frees up more workforce for development and innovation work.”—Aries Wang, Research and Development Deputy Manager, Yile Technology

Gives freedom from proprietary tools for IT

Multi-cloud is a reality. Proprietary tools often require specialized skills and lock you into huge licensing fees. You can minimize vendor lock-in and be well placed to maximize the benefits of a mutli-cloud strategy with conformant Kubernetes supported across multiple environments including all major cloud providers. Kubernetes’ workload portability provides you the flexibility to move your apps around without constraints.

“MeilleursAgents is a product-oriented company and our goal is to deliver new services as fast as we can, in order to get market feedback, and improve them once they’re in production. Google Kubernetes Engine helps us do that by delivering flexibility and easy scaling, which is why we decided to make the switch.”—Thibault Lanternier, Head of Web Engineering, MeilleursAgents

Join us at Building for the future with Kubernetes to kickstart or accelerate your Kubernetes journey. You’ll get access to technical demos that go deep into our Kubernetes services, developer tools, operations suite and security solutions. We look forward to partnering with you on your Kubernetes journey!