GKE Open Source Accelerator

What problem are we solving?

Using the Google Cloud GKE Managed Service makes life easier, especially when you don’t have sufficient resources to manage the infrastructure and workloads on top of your Kubernetes clusters yourself. But the real question remains: Is your GKE setup optimised to support your growth?

GKE clusters can be optimised for security, scalability, performance, cost savings, observability, reliability, and resilience with open-source tools, clever tweaks, and config changes. In practice though, we find that even experienced engineers can be unaware of the customisation options available to them, leaving their platform with serious performance and security gaps.

Who benefits the most?

Successful companies that use GKE but experience scalability challenges
Companies on a growth trajectory that aspire to deliver excellent reliability and performance to their customers
Companies that want to manage the resources utilisation to extend their runway
Companies that want to provide customers with improved security
Companies that want to improve developer self-service in their organisation

Let’s get solving!

Orientation

Investigate the current state of your GKE setup in terms of security, scalability, performance, cost optimisation, observation, reliability, and resiliency
Alignment of business and operational goals
Understand how people, processes, methodology, and technology interact
Build a prioritised backlog for improvements in areas that are found lacking

Implementation

Start delivering on the agreed-upon work items with the right tools, designs, and configuration to address the prioritised needs
Apply Cloud Native design principles and best practices for GKE
Introduce open-source tools such as the External Secrets Operator (ESO) and Workload Identity to improve security
Avoid overspend by utilising open-source tools like OpenCost or Google Cost Management to keep your expenses transparent and sustainable
Benefit from open-source tools like Grafana, Cilium, Calico, and other CNCF Projects depending on your requirements
Implement best practices for improved scalability and performance, preferably using IPs in VPC-native clusters, cluster load balancing, reducing pod initialisation times, horizontal pod auto-scaler, or tools like Keda
Benefit from native integrations with GCP services like Operation Suite, Managed Prometheus, Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Alerting, Cloud SQL, and Secret Manager
Balance the development and platform teams' needs: Manage the environment with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform to increase operational excellence. Improve developer self-service with tools like Crossplane or ConfigConnector
Integrate approaches such as GitOps to provide an operational framework that provides best practices for application development and delivery
Ensure pair programming and other knowledge sharing about the implementation takes place

Celebration

Documentation
Improvement review: What did we achieve?
Recommended subsequent actions

Cloud Native with Google Cloud