
Etcd size monitoring in GKE
Google Cloud lets you run Kubernetes in three flavors:
- Vanilla is when you do all on your own. This is also the quickest “lift and shift” strategy to migrate your cluster to cloud. Essentially it is just a group of virtual machines that run on Google Compute Engine (GCE).
- Managed that shifts administration and maintenance tasks from DevOps teams to the cloud service. See Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Standard cluster architecture and Autopilot for more details.
- Knative, that is sometimes referred to as cloud native, which hides control plane and other infrastructure details behind the familiar interface of workload launching. Cloud Run offers running service and job workloads using the GKE platform behind the Knative interface.
Many DevOps teams prefer the managed flavor to enjoy a balance between carefree administration and the level of control that is very close to vanilla Kubernetes. Comparing GKE Autopilot and Standard, many prefer Standard due to higher control granularity over node management, security and version configuration and other options. In the cluster observability domain, these differences are less distinctive since both come with a rich set of monitoring and logging capabilities including control plane metrics.