Google Associate Cloud Engineer: GKE for Cloud Engineers

Google Kubernetes Engine gives cloud engineers a managed Kubernetes control plane, but it still asks them to make architectural choices about cluster mode, location, networking, identity, upgrades, capacity, and workload behavior. The managed service removes much of the undifferentiated work of running Kubernetes, yet a production cluster can still be unreliable or insecure if the workloads and surrounding Google Cloud architecture are poorly designed.

The useful mental model is to separate the platform boundary from the application boundary. GKE can operate control-plane infrastructure and, in Autopilot, much of the node infrastructure as well.