Node Pools & Machine Types

Node pools are groups of nodes within a GKE cluster that share the same configuration — machine type, disk type, OS image, labels, and taints. They give you fine-grained control over the compute resources available to your workloads, allowing you to run different types of workloads on different types of hardware within the same cluster.

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What Is a Node Pool?

A node pool is a set of identically configured Compute Engine VMs. Every GKE cluster has at least one node pool (the default pool), and you can add additional pools with different configurations. Each pool can be independently scaled, upgraded, and configured.

Common Use Cases for Multiple Node Pools

Use Case	Node Pool Configuration
General workloads	e2-standard-4, auto-scaling 1–10 nodes
Memory-intensive	n2-highmem-8 for databases and caching
GPU workloads	n1-standard-4 with NVIDIA T4 GPU for ML training
Spot/preemptible	e2-standard-4 with spot VMs for batch processing
Windows containers	Windows Server node pool for .NET applications

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Creating and Managing Node Pools

# Create a new node pool
gcloud container node-pools create high-memory-pool \
  --cluster my-cluster \
  --region europe-west2 \
  --machine-type n2-highmem-8 \
  --num-nodes 2 \
  --enable-autoscaling --min-nodes 1 --max-nodes 5

# Create a GPU node pool
gcloud container node-pools create gpu-pool \
  --cluster my-cluster \
  --region europe-west2 \
  --machine-type n1-standard-4 \
  --accelerator type=nvidia-tesla-t4,count=1 \
  --num-nodes 0 \
  --enable-autoscaling --min-nodes 0 --max-nodes 4

# Create a Spot VM node pool (cost savings up to 91%)
gcloud container node-pools create spot-pool \
  --cluster my-cluster \
  --region europe-west2 \
  --machine-type e2-standard-4 \
  --spot \
  --enable-autoscaling --min-nodes 0 --max-nodes 20

# List node pools
gcloud container node-pools list --cluster my-cluster --region europe-west2

# Resize a node pool
gcloud container clusters resize my-cluster \
  --node-pool default-pool \
  --num-nodes 5 \
  --region europe-west2

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Machine Type Families

Google Cloud offers several machine type families, each optimised for different workloads:

General Purpose

Family	Description	Use Cases
E2	Cost-optimised, shared-core and standard	Dev/test, small web apps, microservices
N2	Balanced performance, Intel	General workloads, web servers, databases
N2D	Balanced performance, AMD	Same as N2, often better price-performance
C3	Latest generation, highest performance	Demanding general-purpose workloads

Compute-Optimised

Family	Description	Use Cases
C2	Highest per-core performance	Gaming, HPC, single-threaded workloads
C2D	AMD EPYC, high core counts	Batch processing, media encoding

Memory-Optimised

Family	Description	Use Cases
M1/M2/M3	Up to 12 TiB of memory	SAP HANA, large in-memory databases
N2-highmem	High memory-to-CPU ratio	Redis, Memcached, analytics