Google Cloud

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.

You may have seen this notice when opening SLOs Overview in Cloud Console.

This notice announces a recent change in the way of defining services for Cloud Monitoring. Before the change, Cloud Monitoring automatically discovered services that were provisioned in AppEngine, Cloud Run or GKE. These services were automatically populated in the Services Overview dashboard. After the change, all services in the Services Overview dashboard have to be created explicitly. To simplify this task, when defining a new service in UI you are presented with a list of candidates that is built based on the auto-discovered services. The full list of the auto-discovered services includes managed services from AppEngine, Cloud Run and Istio as well as GKE workloads and services. Besides UI you can add managed services to Cloud Monitoring using the services.create API or using the Terraform google_monitoring_service resource.

Google Cloud supports service monitoring by defining and tracking SLO of the services based on their metrics that are ingested to Google Cloud. This support greatly simplifies implementing SRE practices for services that are deployed to Google Cloud or that store telemetry data there. To make it even more simple to developers, the service monitoring is able to automatically detect many types of managed services and supports predefined availability and latency SLI definitions for them.
When you define a new SLO you are prompted to select a predefined SLI or to define your own.