Kaslin Fields joins Stephanie Wong hosting the podcast this week as we talk all about GKE Autopilot with our guests Yochay Kiriaty and William Denniss. GKE Autopilot manages tasks like quantity and size of nodes so deploying workloads is faster and machines are used efficiently. Autopilot also offers cluster management options, including monitoring the health of nodes and other components.

William and Yochay explain that GKE Autopilot was built to aid companies in the efficient use of resources and give clients more time to focus on their projects. Important efficiency features that are optional in GKE, like multidimensional pod autoscaling, are employed automatically for clients in Autopilot, giving clients peace of mind. Kubernetes best practices are auto-deployed for projects so clients can rest assured things will run as quickly and smoothly as possible without extra work.

Kubernetes is a great way to manage containers, and our guests describe cases where this tool is best suited. We compare GKE standard mode and Autopilot, and Yochay tells us when developers might choose standard mode to allow for more specific customization. He talks about migrating between standard and Autopilot clusters with the goal of easy migration by the end of this year. Security is important for GKE, and we talk about the Autopilot security configurations and why they were chosen.

Later, our guests walk us through the process of a Kubernetes project on Autopilot, highlighting decisions this tool makes automatically for you and why. Though Autopilot sounds very much like a serverless offering, William explains the differences between tools like Cloud Run and GKE Autopilot. We also hear about the future of Autopilot, including some exciting new features coming soon.

Yochay Kiriaty

Yochay is a Product Manager for GKE responsible for security.

William Denniss

William is a Product Manager for GKE Autopilot. He’s currently writing a book called Kubernetes Quickly.

Cool things of the week

• Google Cloud Region Picker site
  • Faster, cheaper, greener? Pick the Google Cloud region that’s right for you blog
• 5 resources to help you get started with SRE blog

Interview

• Kubernetes site
• GKE site
• Autopilot Overview docs
• GCP Podcast Episode 252: GKE Cost Optimization with Kaslin Fields and Anthony Bushong podcast
• Multidimensional Pod Autoscaling docs
• Docker site
• Cloud Run site
• Introducing GKE Autopilot: a revolution in managed Kubernetes blog
• Creating an Autopilot cluster docs

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Kaslin has been working on KubeCon EU as a volunteer and will be presenting there as well.