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Leave the management to GKE
Early access customers have found that choosing Autopilot has the potential to dramatically improve the performance, security, and resilience of their Kubernetes environments, while reducing the overall operational load required for managing Autopilot clusters. Here are some of the benefits they are excited about.
Optimize for production like a Kubernetes expert
With Autopilot, GKE creates clusters based on battle-tested and hardened best practices learned from Google SRE and engineering experience. These optimized configurations are ready for production, helping reduce the GKE learning curve. GKE also automatically provisions cluster infrastructure based on your workload specifications and can take care of managing and maintaining the node infrastructure.
“Reducing the complexity while getting the most out of Kubernetes is key for us and GKE Autopilot does exactly that!” – Mario Kleinsasser, team leader at Strabag International
Enjoy a stronger security posture from the get-go
GKE already does a lot to help secure your cluster–from hardening the lowest level of hardware, through the virtualization, operating system, Kubernetes, and container layers. With Autopilot, GKE helps secure the cluster infrastructure based on years of experience running the GKE fleet. Autopilot implements GKE hardening guidelines and security best practices, utilizing GCP unique security features like Shielded GKE Nodes and Workload Identity. In addition, Autopilot blocks certain features deemed as less safe such as External IP Services or legacy authorization, disabling CAP_NET_RAW and restricting specific cipher suite usage. By locking down individual Kubernetes nodes, Autopilot further helps reduce the cluster’s attack surface, and minimizes ongoing security configuration mistakes.
Use Google as your SRE for both nodes and the control plane
Google SRE already handles cluster management for GKE; with Autopilot, Google SREs manage your nodes as well, including provisioning, maintenance, and lifecycle management. Because Autopilot nodes are locked down, sysadmin-level modifications that could result in nodes being unsupportable can be prevented. Autopilot also supports maintenance windows and a pod disruption budget for maintenance flexibility. In addition to GKE’s SLA on hosts and the control plane, Autopilot also includes an SLA on Pods–a first.
“GKE Autopilot is the real serverless K8s platform that we’ve been waiting for. Developers can focus on their workloads, and leave the management of underlying infrastructure to Google SREs.” – Boris Simandoff, VP Engineering, at Via Transportation, Inc.
Pay for the optimized resources you use
With Autopilot, we provision and scale the underlying compute infrastructure based on your workload specifications and dynamic load, helping to provide highly efficient resource optimization. Autopilot dynamically adjusts compute resources, so there’s no need to figure out what size and shape nodes you should configure for your workloads. With Autopilot, you pay only for the pods you use and you’re billed per second for vCPU, memory and disk resource requests. No more worries about unused capacity!
