GCP – Celebrating 10 years of GKE: Incredible customer journeys, amazing AI futures

The evolution of the cloud has been tremendous over the past decade. Every step of the way, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) has been there to meet new challenges. From giving DevOps more scalable foundations to supporting the rise of cloud-native AI, we took Kubernetes’ brilliance and gave it the fully managed service it deserved to thrive.

GKE turns 10 this year, and to celebrate, we’ve launched 10 years of GKE, an ebook that explores this incredible decade and how customers have built global businesses powered on this managed platform. We released Kubernetes as open source in 2014, and one million contributions later, we couldn’t be prouder of what Kubernetes has become, its history, and its future with GKE.

GKE’s leading lights

One of the earliest GKE customers was Signify, a global leader in lighting for professionals and the company behind Philips Hue. Ten years on, it continues to thrive on the service. Growing from 200 million to 3.5 billion daily transactions, Signify scaled from one GKE cluster to seven, and is looking to leverage GKE for new workloads, including platform engineering and AI for multi-cluster supervision.

“The constant improvements made by GKE over the past 10 years profoundly changed the way we design, deploy, and evolve our services,” says Leon Bouwmeester, Director of Engineering and Head of Hue Platform at Signify. “We spend less time on infrastructure management and can focus our efforts on what really matters: the quality of the user experience and the speed of innovation.”

However, what put GKE on the map was Pokémon GO, Niantic’s ground-breaking geolocation game. As millions took to the streets to catch ‘em all, GKE brought to life and kept up with its explosive launch. “Never have I taken part in anything close to the growth that Google Cloud customer Niantic experienced with the launch of Pokémon GO,” says Luke Stone, director of customer reliability engineering at Google Cloud.

AI for tomorrow on GKE today

Today, GKE supports  brand new businesses in the rapidly evolving world of AI. Customers report how their AI initiatives are made more powerful on GKE, helping them manage the complex demands of their deployments. This means flexibility and scale for AI workloads and cost-efficient inference — so you can focus on training, not managing.

With GKE Autopilot, AI can also help you optimize your configurations and workloads. In the ebook, learn more about how GKE Autopilot mode frees up teams to focus on innovation, with businesses sharing how they automatically improved performance and cost savings — with the stability and security they expect from Google Cloud.

Join the celebration by exploring 10 years of GKE for yourself. We‘ve distilled a decade of insights into what makes GKE so effective, thoughts from customers on how GKE is supporting their work at scale, and why we’re ready for everything AI has in store for the decade ahead. It’s been an amazing ride, and with AI reshaping the future of application development, we’re just getting started.