GCP – Happy birthday, GKE! Let’s celebrate with new features and better pricing

“While containers make packaging apps easier, a powerful cluster manager and orchestration system is necessary to bring your workloads to production.”

Ten years ago, these words opened the blog post announcing Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The need for a managed Kubernetes platform is as important today as it was then, especially as workloads have evolved to meet increasingly complex demands.

One year before GKE’s arrival, we open-sourced large parts of our internal container management system, Borg, as Kubernetes. This marked the beginning of offering our own platforms to customers, and as we continue to use Kubernetes and GKE to power leading services like Vertex AI, we distill our learnings and best practices into GKE. Innovating and evolving GKE to meet the demands of our global platforms and services means that we deliver a best-in-class platform for our customers.

Enhanced flexibility with updated pricing

After ten years of evolution comes another shift: we are updating GKE to make sure every customer can balance efficiency, performance, and cost as effectively as possible. In September 2025, we’re moving to a single paid tier of GKE that comes with more features, and that lets you add features as needed. Now, every customer can take advantage of multi-cluster management features like Fleets, Teams, Config Management, and Policy Controller — all available with GKE Standard at no additional cost.

Flexibility and versatility are always in demand. The new GKE pricing structure provides à la carte access to additional features to meet the specific needs of all of your clusters. We want you to direct your resources toward the most impactful work at all times, and are confident that a single GKE pricing tier will help you manage your workloads — and your budgets — more effectively. 

Optimized compute with Autopilot for every cluster

When we launched GKE Autopilot four years ago, we made Kubernetes accessible to every organization — no Kubernetes expertise required. More recently, we rolled out a new container-optimized compute platform, which delivers unique efficiency and performance benefits, ensuring you get the most out of your workload’s allocated resources, so you can serve more traffic with the same capacity, or existing traffic with fewer resources.

Now, we’re making Autopilot available for every cluster, including existing GKE Standard clusters, on an ad hoc, and per-workload basis. Soon, you’ll be able to turn on Autopilot (and off) in any existing Standard cluster to take advantage of fully managed Kubernetes with better performance, at the best price.

Innovations for customer success

The technological landscape shifts quickly. A few years ago, organizations were thinking about stateless microservices; today, the focus is on running complex AI workloads. Throughout, we’re always adapting GKE to meet the needs of innovative companies for new scenarios.

We’re proud of the many incredible products and services built on GKE by customers ranging from startups, to enterprises, to AI companies. AI-powered advertising provider Moloco trains and runs its models with TPUs running on GKE. For nearly a decade, Signify has leveraged GKE as the foundation for its Philips Hue smart lighting platform worldwide. And AI unicorn Anthropic depends on GKE to deliver the scale they need to train and serve their models.   

“GKE’s new support for larger clusters provides the scale we need to accelerate our pace of AI innovation.” – James Bradbury, Head of Compute, Anthropic

Foundations for consistent evolution

The AI era has just begun, and we’ve been pushing GKE to meet tomorrow’s workload demands today. With customer insights and Google’s best practices baked in, GKE is the ideal platform for developing and deploying AI at scale. 

Thank you to our community, customers, and partners who have been on the GKE journey with us. Celebrate a decade of GKE with us by joining the GKE Turns 10 Hackathon and reading the 10 years of GKE ebook. The future is revealing itself every day, and GKE is ready for wherever AI takes us next.