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Google Kubernetes Engine

Deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications on Kubernetes, powered by Google Cloud

What is Google Kubernetes Engine?

Container Engine takes care of provisioning and maintaining the underlying virtual machine cluster, scaling your application, and operational logistics like logging, monitoring, and health management.
Google Kubernetes Engine is a tool in the Containers as a Service category of a tech stack.

Who uses Google Kubernetes Engine?

Companies
385 companies reportedly use Google Kubernetes Engine in their tech stacks, including Shopify, Delivery Hero, and The New York Times.

Developers
703 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Google Kubernetes Engine.

Google Kubernetes Engine Integrations

Docker, Kubernetes, Traefik, GoLand, and Buddy are some of the popular tools that integrate with Google Kubernetes Engine. Here's a list of all 44 tools that integrate with Google Kubernetes Engine.
Pros of Google Kubernetes Engine
18
Backed by Google
18
Powered by kubernetes
13
Docker
12
Scalable
7
Open source
3
Command line interface is intuitive
3
Decoupled app
2
Provisioning
2
Declarative management
Decisions about Google Kubernetes Engine

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Google Kubernetes Engine in their tech stack.

Yeray Álvarez Romero added Google Kubernetes Engine to Infrastructure Stack. This was part of a larger change in a Pull Request titled: kubernetes in production

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We are building a product that runs both on-prem and on our Google Kubernetes Engine clusters, and I am working on building a monitoring solution.

Our app is dockerized and usually deployed using Kubernetes.

I am currently looking into tools for centralized logging, but there is a catch. Some of our customers do not allow exporting the logs to our cloud solution; so basically, I am looking for a solution that will work for all 3 use cases:

  1. Cloud clusters

  2. On-prem which can report to our central cloud logging solution

  3. On-prem which can be only accessed locally

We are currently using GCP Logging since it's pretty easy to get started with, but if it does not answer our use case, we are fine with replacing it.

I was considering ELK, but in my experience, it can be pretty complicated to manage.

Are there other recommended solutions?

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Emanuel Evans
Senior Architect at Rainforest QA · | 20 upvotes · 1.5M views

We recently moved our main applications from Heroku to Kubernetes . The 3 main driving factors behind the switch were scalability (database size limits), security (the inability to set up PostgreSQL instances in private networks), and costs (GCP is cheaper for raw computing resources).

We prefer using managed services, so we are using Google Kubernetes Engine with Google Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL for our PostgreSQL databases and Google Cloud Memorystore for Redis . For our CI/CD pipeline, we are using CircleCI and Google Cloud Build to deploy applications managed with Helm . The new infrastructure is managed with Terraform .

Read the blog post to go more in depth.

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Russel Werner
Lead Engineer at StackShare · | 8 upvotes · 621.4K views

We began our hosting journey, as many do, on Heroku because they make it easy to deploy your application and automate some of the routine tasks associated with deployments, etc. However, as our team grew and our product matured, our needs have outgrown Heroku. I will dive into the history and reasons for this in a future blog post.

We decided to migrate our infrastructure to Kubernetes running on Amazon EKS. Although Google Kubernetes Engine has a slightly more mature Kubernetes offering and is more user-friendly; we decided to go with EKS because we already using other AWS services (including a previous migration from Heroku Postgres to AWS RDS). We are still in the process of moving our main website workloads to EKS, however we have successfully migrate all our staging and testing PR apps to run in a staging cluster. We developed a Slack chatops application (also running in the cluster) which automates all the common tasks of spinning up and managing a production-like cluster for a pull request. This allows our engineering team to iterate quickly and safely test code in a full production environment. Helm plays a central role when deploying our staging apps into the cluster. We use CircleCI to build docker containers for each PR push, which are then published to Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECR). An upgrade-operator process watches the ECR repository for new containers and then uses Helm to rollout updates to the staging environments. All this happens automatically and makes it really easy for developers to get code onto servers quickly. The immutable and isolated nature of our staging environments means that we can do anything we want in that environment and quickly re-create or restore the environment to start over.

The next step in our journey is to migrate our production workloads to an EKS cluster and build out the CD workflows to get our containers promoted to that cluster after our QA testing is complete in our staging environments.

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Blog Posts

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Google Kubernetes Engine's Features

  • Docker support - Improve the predictability of your deployments with Docker containers. Containers make it easy to deploy applications across environments.
  • Better ops - Give ops a better system, starting with a managed compute cluster. Container Engine takes care of provisioning and maintaining the underlying virtual machines and operational logistics like logging, monitoring, and health management.
  • Declarative management - Use declarative syntax to define your application requirements. Container Engine will actively manage your application, ensuring your containers are running and scheduling additional as needed.
  • Scalable - Run multiple containers in a single virtual machine, or scale to many as your application grows. Container Engine makes it easy to manage your containers across a group of virtual machines.
  • Powered by Kubernetes - Container Engine is powered by the open source Kubernetes technology. Join the discussion on Kubernetes and be part of the growing community.
  • Decoupled apps - Let developers focus on code, with very few constraints. Create loosely coupled microservice apps that are more robust and easier to maintain and extend.

Google Kubernetes Engine Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Google Kubernetes Engine?
Google App Engine
Google has a reputation for highly reliable, high performance infrastructure. With App Engine you can take advantage of the 10 years of knowledge Google has in running massively scalable, performance driven systems. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow.
Red Hat OpenShift
OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine is a service that provides virtual machines that run on Google infrastructure. Google Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that allows you to easily launch large compute clusters on Google's infrastructure. There are no upfront investments and you can run up to thousands of virtual CPUs on a system that has been designed from the ground up to be fast, and to offer strong consistency of performance.
Kubernetes
Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.
Git
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
See all alternatives

Google Kubernetes Engine's Followers
809 developers follow Google Kubernetes Engine to keep up with related blogs and decisions.