Identity and access management Control access in the cluster with your Google accounts and role permissions.

Hybrid networking Reserve an IP address range for your cluster, allowing your cluster IPs to coexist with private network IPs via Google Cloud VPN.

Security and compliance GKE is backed by a Google security team of over 750 experts and is both HIPAA and PCI DSS compliant.

Integrated logging and monitoring Enable Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring with simple checkbox configurations, making it easy to gain insight into how your application is running.

Cluster options Choose clusters tailored to the availability, version stability, isolation, and pod traffic requirements of your workloads.

Auto scale Automatically scale your application deployment up and down based on resource utilization (CPU, memory).

Auto upgrade Automatically keep your cluster up to date with the latest release version of Kubernetes. Kubernetes release updates are quickly made available within GKE.

Auto repair When auto repair is enabled, if a node fails a health check, GKE initiates a repair process for that node.

Resource limits Kubernetes allows you to specify how much CPU and memory (RAM) each container needs, which is used to better organize workloads within your cluster.

Container isolation Use GKE Sandbo x for a second layer of defense between containerized workloads on GKE for enhanced workload security.

Stateful application support GKE isn't just for 12-factor apps. You can attach persistent storage to containers, and even host complete databases.

Docker image support GKE supports the common Docker container format.

Fully managed GKE clusters are fully managed by Google Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), ensuring your cluster is available and up-to-date.

OS built for containers GKE runs on Container-Optimized OS, a hardened OS built and managed by Google.

Private container registry Integrating with Google Container Registry makes it easy to store and access your private Docker images.

Fast consistent builds Use Cloud Build to reliably deploy your containers on GKE without needing to setup authentication.

Workload portability, on-premises and cloud GKE runs Certified Kubernetes, enabling workload portability to other Kubernetes platforms across clouds and on-premises.

GPU and TPU support GKE supports GPUs and TPUs and makes it easy to run ML, GPGPU, HPC, and other workloads that benefit from specialized hardware accelerators.

Built-in dashboard Cloud Console offers useful dashboards for your project's clusters and their resources. You can use these dashboards to view, inspect, manage, and delete resources in your clusters.

Preemptible VMs Low-cost, short-term instances designed to run batch jobs and fault-tolerant workloads. Preemptible VMs provide significant savings of up to 80% while still getting the same performance and capabilities as regular VMs.

Persistent disks support Durable, high-performance block storage for container instances. Data is stored redundantly for integrity, flexibility to resize storage without interruption, and automatic encryption. You can create persistent disks in HDD or SSD formats. You can also take snapshots of your persistent disk and create new persistent disks from that snapshot.

Local SSD support GKE offers always-encrypted local solid-state drive (SSD) block storage. Local SSDs are physically attached to the server that hosts the virtual machine instance for very high input/output operations per second (IOPS) and very low latency compared to persistent disks.

Global load balancing Global load-balancing technology helps you distribute incoming requests across pools of instances across multiple regions, so you can achieve maximum performance, throughput, and availability at low cost.

Linux and Windows support Fully supported for both Linux and Windows workloads, GKE can run both Windows Server and Linux nodes.

Hybrid and multi-cloud support Take advantage of Kubernetes and cloud technology in your own data center. Get the GKE experience with quick, managed, and simple installs as well as upgrades validated by Google through Anthos GKE

Serverless containers Run stateless serverless containers abstracting away all infrastructure management and automatically scale them with Cloud Run

Usage metering Fine-grained visibility to your Kubernetes clusters. See your GKE clusters' resource usage broken down by namespaces and labels, and attribute it to meaningful entities.

Release channels Release channels provide more control over which automatic updates a given cluster receives, based on the stability requirements of the cluster and its workloads. You can choose rapid, regular, or stable. Each has a different release cadence and targets different types of workloads.

Software supply chain security Verify, enforce, and improve security of infrastructure components and packages used for container images with Container Analysis.