GKE Best Practices

Running production workloads on GKE requires attention to cluster design, resource management, cost optimisation, monitoring, and operational practices. This lesson consolidates best practices for building reliable, secure, and cost-effective GKE deployments.

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Cluster Design

Use Regional Clusters for Production

Regional clusters have three control plane replicas across zones, providing high availability. Zonal clusters have a single control plane that becomes unavailable during upgrades or zone outages.

Use Autopilot for Reduced Operations

For most new workloads, start with Autopilot. It eliminates node management, enforces security best practices, and bills per pod. Only choose Standard mode when you need custom DaemonSets, privileged containers, or full node control.

Use Private Clusters

Private clusters prevent nodes from having public IP addresses, reducing the attack surface. Use authorised networks to control which CIDR ranges can access the control plane.

Use Release Channels

Enable release channels (Regular for most workloads, Stable for risk-averse environments) to receive automatic Kubernetes version upgrades with Google-tested patches.

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Resource Management

Always Set Resource Requests and Limits