Explore GKE documentation

GKE has a rich ecosystem of features and products that help you deploy, run, and manage your containerized applications at scale. However, this also means there's a lot of documentation. Each documentation set in the GKE family contains guides, tutorials, reference material, release notes, examples, and more. This quick guide will help you find your way around.

If you're brand new to GKE, we recommend that you start your exploration with Start learning about GKE.

The big picture

The GKE documentation is organized into several documentation sets, reflecting the structure of the wider GKE ecosystem and families of features. Most users won't need to read beyond the core GKE documentation. Platform admins and operators, particularly if they're working with multiple clusters and our enterprise tier, might need to explore the documentation more broadly.

  • Core GKE documentation (this documentation set), which introduces GKE and covers core features that are available to all GKE users.
  • GKE networking documentation, for network administrators or anyone else who needs to dive deeper into GKE and Kubernetes networking.
  • Fleet management documentation, for when you want to manage groups of GKE clusters together as a fleet.
  • GKE Enterprise documentation, if you want to enable the enterprise tier, which builds on core GKE functionality and fleets to give you powerful features for working at enterprise scale. Richer enterprise features for GKE, such as Cloud Service Mesh, have their own documentation sets.
  • GKE outside Google Cloud documentation sets, for users who want to use GKE on-premises or on other public clouds.

You can read more about these documentation sets in the following sections.

Core GKE documentation

Start here. This documentation set covers core concepts and features that are available to all GKE users, with material for both IT administrators and Developers. It includes the following topics:

  • Learn fundamentals: Kubernetes and GKE basics for new users. If you're new to Kubernetes, Google Cloud, or GKE, this section will help you learn the essentials.
  • Get started: Ready to create your first cluster? Here's what you need to know about.
  • Set up GKE clusters: Detailed instructions for creating and configuring Autopilot and Standard clusters.
  • Reduce and optimize costs: Learn how and why to use cost optimization features in GKE.
  • Provision storage: Learn about the supported storage options for GKE and how to use them.
  • Configure cluster security: GKE provides many ways to secure your workloads. This section introduces you to GKE security features and how to use them.
  • Deploy workloads: Learn how to deploy different types of workloads on GKE, from simple stateless apps to databases, caches, and data streaming workloads.
  • AI/ML workloads: Deploy AI/ML workloads that use specialist Google Cloud hardware.
  • Manage and optimize clusters: Learn about administering clusters, including upgrades, notifications, and recommendations, plus node pool management for Standard clusters.
  • Observability for GKE: Use managed Prometheus, Cloud Monitoring, and Cloud Logging to observe your clusters and workloads.
  • Troubleshoot: Find troubleshooting guidance and known issues for all core features.

This documentation set also includes reference material for the Kubernetes Engine (GKE) AP.

GKE networking

For network administrators (or anyone else who needs to dive deeper into GKE and Kubernetes networking), GKE networking documentation shows you how to configure and work with networking and traffic management features for your clusters. Topics range from planning your networking infrastructure on Google Cloud to setting up load balancers, exposing workloads as Services, and configuring cluster isolation. This documentation set includes the following GKE topics (and more), as well as links to useful sections in the Google Cloud Virtual Private Cloud and Compute Engine networking documentation.

GKE fleet management

If you're a platform or cluster administrator who needs to work with multiple GKE clusters, possibly across multiple Google Cloud projects, GKE uses the concept of a fleet to simplify managing multiple clusters, regardless of which project they exist in and what workloads run on them. The fleet management documentation includes information about:

  • Planning fleets: Learn how fleets work, with practical guidance for grouping your organization's clusters into fleets and enabling fleet features.
  • Create your fleet: How to add clusters to fleets.
  • Work with fleet features: Learn how to adopt, configure, and manage fleet-enabled features (including those included in GKE Enterprise) for your clusters and workloads.
  • Fleet team management: Simplify provisioning and managing GKE resources for multiple teams across multiple clusters.
  • Observe your fleet: Get an at-a-glance view of your entire fleet and view fleet-scoped logs and metrics.

This documentation set also includes reference material for the GKE Hub (Fleet) API.

GKE Enterprise

Enabling the GKE Enterprise tier gives you access to additional powerful features for working at enterprise scale, many of which build on GKE fleet management. The documentation includes the following, as well as information about how to enable and disable GKE Enterprise:

Enterprise features

  • Cloud Service Mesh: Enables managed, observable, and secure communication among your services, making it easier for you to create robust enterprise applications made up of many microservices on GKE.
  • Config Sync: Provides a consistent way to manage GKE cluster configuration, with configuration applied automatically from a single source of truth.
  • Policy Controller: Apply and enforce consistent policies on your GKE clusters.
  • Binary Authorization: Ensures that only trusted images are deployed on your GKE clusters.

GKE outside Google Cloud

Many organizations using Google Cloud also want or need to run workloads in their own data centers, factory floors, retail stores, and even in other public clouds – but they don't want to build new container platforms themselves in all these locations, or rethink how they configure, secure, monitor, and optimize container workloads depending on where they're running. GKE Multi-Cloud and Google Distributed Cloud both extend GKE for use outside Google Cloud and support a subset of GKE standard and enterprise features, letting you create and manage hybrid or entirely on-premises deployments.

GKE Multi-Cloud

  • GKE on AWS: Work with GKE clusters running on AWS infrastructure.
  • GKE on Azure: Work with GKE clusters running on Azure infrastructure.
  • GKE attached clusters: Add CNCF-conformant Kubernetes clusters to your fleet to view and manage along with your GKE clusters, with instructions for EKS, AKS, and other conformant cluster types.

Google Distributed Cloud (on-premises)