“While containers make packaging apps easier, a powerful cluster manager and orchestration system is necessary to bring your workloads to production.”
Ten years ago, these words opened the blog post announcing Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The need for a managed Kubernetes platform is as important today as it was then, especially as workloads have evolved to meet increasingly complex demands.
One year before GKE’s arrival, we open-sourced large parts of our internal container management system, Borg, as Kubernetes. This marked the beginning of offering our own platforms to customers, and as we continue to use Kubernetes and GKE to power leading services like Vertex AI, we distill our learnings and best practices into GKE. Innovating and evolving GKE to meet the demands of our global platforms and services means that we deliver a best-in-class platform for our customers.
Enhanced flexibility with updated pricing
After ten years of evolution comes another shift: we are updating GKE to make sure every customer can balance efficiency, performance, and cost as effectively as possible. In September 2025, we’re moving to a single paid tier of GKE that comes with more features, and that lets you add features as needed. Now, every customer can take advantage of multi-cluster management features like Fleets, Teams, Config Management, and Policy Controller — all available with GKE Standard at no additional cost.
Flexibility and versatility are always in demand. The new GKE pricing structure provides à la carte access to additional features to meet the specific needs of all of your clusters. We want you to direct your resources toward the most impactful work at all times, and are confident that a single GKE pricing tier will help you manage your workloads — and your budgets — more effectively.
Optimized compute with Autopilot for every cluster
When we launched GKE Autopilot four years ago, we made Kubernetes accessible to every organization — no Kubernetes expertise required. More recently, we rolled out a new container-optimized compute platform, which delivers unique efficiency and performance benefits, ensuring you get the most out of your workload’s allocated resources, so you can serve more traffic with the same capacity, or existing traffic with fewer resources.
Now, we’re making Autopilot available for every cluster, including existing GKE Standard clusters, on an ad hoc, and per-workload basis. Soon, you’ll be able to turn on Autopilot (and off) in any existing Standard cluster to take advantage of fully managed Kubernetes with better performance, at the best price.
