Key Architectural Considerations for a Production-Ready Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Setup

Originally published on priyathgregory.dev.

This article outlines crucial architectural elements necessary to establish a production-ready Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) setup. Insights have been derived from recent infrastructure re-engineering efforts within our organisation, where an end-to-end GKE cluster setup was completed, with a strong emphasis on industry-standard design and security.

This is not an implementation guide, but rather a bird’s eye view of key architectural components that need to be in place for secure, production ready, GKE infrastructure.

Diagrammed below is a visual representation outlining the adopted GKE architecture:

GKE Architecture Overview

The following key areas of architectural significance were identified:

1. VPC network
2. GKE cluster
3. Load balancer (with the Kubernetes gateway resource)
4. NAT gateway
5. Bastion host
6. CICD pipeline