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Autopilot offers a slightly more abstract view of compute infrastructure than GKE’s Standard mode. The idea is to focus more on the different use-cases than the minutiae of individual machine configurations. However, if you’re coming from GKE Standard or GCE, and know those machine types well, you might want to understand the mapping between the … Read more

Connect internal services from multiple clusters together in one logical namespace. Easily connect services running in Autopilot to Standard and vice versa, share services between teams running on their own services, and back an internal service by replicas in multiple clusters for cross-regional availability. All with the Multi-cluster Service support in GKE. For this demo, … Read more

Pod affinity is a useful technique in Kubernetes for expressing a requirement that a pod, say with the “reader” role, is co-located with another pod, say with the “writer’ role. You can express that requirement by adding something like the following to the reader pod. The catch is, if there is no space on the … Read more

Cloud Logging is a useful tool for GKE users (check out these great blog posts on getting the most out of it). You can view all the logs from all your containers, over all clusters. I prefer it to using kubectl get logs for many tasks. For example, I can monitor all pods from a … Read more

PodSpreadTopology is a way to get Kubernetes to spread out your pods across a failure domain, typically nodes or zones. Kubernetes platforms typically have some default spread built in, although it may not be as aggressive as you want (meaning, it might be more tolerant of imbalanced spread). Here’s an example Deployment with a PodSpreadToplogy … Read more

Do you need to provision a whole bunch of ephemeral storage to your Autopilot Pods? For example, as part of a data processing pipeline? In the past with Kubernetes, you might have used emptyDir as a way to allocate a bunch of storage (taken from the node’s boot disk) to your containers. This however requires … Read more

Last week, GKE announced GPU support for Autopilot. Here’s a fun way to try it out: a TensorFlow-enabled Jupyter Notebook with GPU-acceleration! We can even add state, so you can save your work between sessions. Autopilot makes all this really, really easy, as you can configure everything as a Kubernetes object. Setup First, create a … Read more

Let’s say you want to migrate a service in GKE from one cluster to another (including between Standard and Autopilot clusters), and keep the same external IP while you do. DNS might be the ideal way to update your service address, for whatever reason you need to keep the IP the same. Fortunately, it is … Read more

If you like what you see with Autopilot (now the recommended way to use GKE), and want to run it at scale, there are a few things to know when setting up the cluster, and scaling your workload. Cluster Creation To run a large Autopilot cluster, it’s advisable to do two things: 1) create the … Read more

I previously documented how to add spare capacity to an Autopilot Kubernetes cluster, whereby you create a placeholder Deployment to provision some scheduling headroom. This works to constantly give you a certain amount of headroom, so for example if you have a 2vCPU placeholder (a.k.a. balloon) Deployment, and use that capacity it will get rescheduled. … Read more

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This week, Autopilot announced support for the Scale-Out Compute Class, for both x86 and Arm architectures. The point of this compute class is to give you cores for better single-threaded performance, and improved price/performance for “scale-out” workloads — basically for when you are saturating the CPU, and/or need faster single-threaded performance (e.g. remote compilation, etc). … Read more

This week’s big news in Google Cloud was the addition to Arm across a wide range of products, including GCE VMs, and GKE (both Standard and Autopilot). In an earlier post, I covered how to get an Arm-ready Autopilot cluster on day 1. The recommended way to build images for Arm is with buildx. This … Read more

Arm was made available in Preview on Google Cloud, and GKE Autopilot today! As this is an early stage Preview, there’s a few details to pay attention to if you want to try it out, like the version, regions and quota. I put together this quickstart for trying out Arm in Autopilot today. Arm nodes … Read more

There are 3 common reasons why a Pod may be terminated on Autopilot: node upgrades, a cluster scale-down, and a node repair. PDBs and graceful termination periods modify the disruption to pods when these events happen, and maintenance windows and exclusions control when upgrade events can occur. Upgrade gracefulTerminationPeriod: limited to one hourPDB: is respected … Read more

Last month gave a presentation at KubeCon Europe in Valencia on “Building a Nodeless Kubernetes Platform”. In it, I shared the details about the creation of GKE Autopilot including some key decisions that we made, how the product was implemented, and why I believe that the design leads to an ideal fully managed platform. Autopilot … Read more

Spot Pods are a great way to save money on Autopilot, currently 70% off the regular price. The catch is two-fold: Your workload can be disrupted There may not always be spot capacity available For workload disruption, this is simply a judgement call. You should only run workloads that can accept disruption (abrupt termination). If … Read more

Autopilot while being operationally nodeless, still creates nodes for your workloads behind the scenes. Sometimes it may be desirable as an operator to separate your workloads so that certain workloads are scheduled on their separates nodes, a technique known as workload separation. One example I heard recently was a cluster that primarily processes large batch … Read more

One of the neat things about Docker is that you don’t need to install any dev tools on your local machine. Sometimes though you’ll need to run commands in the dev environment without your app being built (say if there is an error building the app, or you want to run a command like rails … Read more

One of the key design decisions of GKE Autopilot is the fact that we kept the same semantic meaning of the Kubernetes node object. It’s “nodeless” in the sense that you don’t need to care about, or plan for nodes—they are provisioned and managed automatically based on your PodSpec. However, the node object still exists … Read more

Ahmet’s blog Did we market Knative wrong? got me interested to try out Knative again. I’ll confess that I found the original Istio requirement a bit of a heavy one just to run serverless, and it looked like the project has matured a lot since the early days. Version 1.0.0 was also just released, so … Read more

Want to run the Knative CLI tool kn in Google Cloud’s Cloud Shell? It’s easy: Download the latest release from github. linux-amd64 is the platform you want for CloudShell. Here I download version 1.0.0: Then, move it into place, and add it to your PATH:

The question often comes up: where do my node resources go in Kubernetes? In this post, I share how to use kubectl describe node to look at resource usage by different categories (system, user, etc). The way I think about Kubernetes node resource usage is to assign resource allocations into 4 categories: OS and Kubernetes … Read more

Sometimes you may wish to create or update a GKE Autopilot cluster with a specific version. For example, the big news this week is that mutating webhooks are supported in Autopilot (from version 1.21.3-gke.900). Rather than waiting for your desired version to be the default in your cluster’s release channel, you can update ahead of … Read more

One of the most important decisions you can make for your Autopilot cluster is selecting the right network size. Too small and you’ll constraint your potential growth. Too large and you might run out of IPs if you have a lot of cluster. You can’t change the Pod address size after creation, so it’s important … Read more

GKE Autopilot is deployed using the regional cluster architecture. This has a number of advantages such as giving you 3 master nodes for high availability of the control plane, and the ability to spread pods among zones for high availability of your workloads. But sometimes this may be more than what you need, and zonal … Read more

GKE Autopilot is pretty magical. You create a cluster just by picking a region and giving it a name, schedule Kubernetes workloads and the compute resources are provisioned automatically. While Kubernetes is provisioning resources, your Pods will be in the Pending state. This is all well and good, except… there are other reasons that your … Read more

I still have a place in my heart for phpMyAdmin, that tool that I was introduced when developing PHP on my shared hosting provider many moons ago. It’s just a great way to inspect your MariaDB/MySQL databases. These days I don’t install any web applications (or databases) on my local machine, I use Docker for … Read more

Autopilot is a new mode of operation for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) where compute capacity is dynamically provisioned based on your pod’s requirements. Among other innovations, it essentially functions as a fully automatic cluster autoscaler. Update: GKE now has an official guide for provisioning spare capacity. When you deploy a new pod in this environment, … Read more