Avenue Code Snippets

Your 60-Second Intro to GKE

Written by Andre Menezes | 6/14/19 8:44 PM

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is a Google Cloud solution for container orchestration. With GKE, we can manage the Kubernetes ecosystem and all routines related to deploying, managing, and monitoring our applications. There are several advantages to using GKE instead of a manually-configured Kubernetes cluster.

In this post, we'll discuss three of our favorite GKE benefits. You can discover more by consulting Google's official documentation. Obviously, you may need to pay to use some additional features, but the benefits to your organization are well worth the investment.

Cluster Autoscaler

If your workloads exceed the maximum resource allocation on the cluster, GKE provides a new node for you to maintain the disponibility of your applications. When the workloads return to the real state, the additional node is automatically removed.

Automatic Node Upgrades and Node Repair

We have the cluster auto scale functionality, but what happens if one node fails or needs manual intervention for maintenance?  Enter the node repair feature! This feature looks for problems with your Kubernetes nodes and resolves issues, automatically replacing failed nodes with new nodes. And if you need to upgrade your cluster, you can do so on the fly with the automatic upgrade feature that guarantees security, reliability, and zero downtime.

Logging and Monitoring

You don't need a comment about the importance of logs, monitoring, and metrics to analyze the behavior of your application and improve it, right? GKE provides native integration with the Stackdriver for analyzing your application logs; all you have to do is enable logging and monitoring on your cluster.

Google Kubernetes Engine saves time and makes it easier for teams to ensure agility, reliability, and security in all operations. In our next post, we will show you how to install and configure a GKE cluster and use some features. Meanwhile, you can find out more about how GCP can help you achieve your goals by clicking below to learn what the Google + Avenue Code partnership can do for you.