GKE is a managed Kubernetes service for containers and container clusters that run on Google Cloud infrastructure. Based on Kubernetes, the open-source container management and orchestration platform Google created, it is used for a range of automation and management tasks related to container deployment and orchestration tasks. These include:

Creating and resizing clusters Creating pods, replication controllers, jobs, services and load balancers Resizing application controllers Updating, upgrading and debugging clusters

Developers often use it to create and test enterprise applications, whereas IT administrators might use it to scale up and enhance performance, for example.

Essentially, GKE is a group of Google Compute Engine instances running Kubernetes. Using it, you can group multiple containers into pods that represent logical groups of related containers and manage them through jobs. Because access to containers might be disrupted if a pod of related containers becomes unavailable, most containerized applications need redundancy to ensure pod access is never compromised. A replication controller within GKE enables users to run the number of pod duplicates they wish at any time.

Groups of pods can be grouped into services, and these mean you don’t need additional code for non-container-aware applications to access other containers. For example, if the pods you use to process data from a client system are set up as a service, the client system can use any of the pods at any time – it doesn’t matter which pod is performing the task.