GKE VS GCE – Which Google Cloud Platform service should I choose?

That’s a common user query that is new to the world of cloud services.

Google Cloud Platform offers countless services including Google Compute Engine (GCE) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

As part of our Managed Cloud Services, we help customers in choosing the right GCP services.

In this write-up, we’ll do an analysis of GKE VS GCE and see what makes them unique from each other.

More details on GKE VS GCE

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers multiple services like Google Compute Engine (GCE), Google Kubernetes Engine (formerly Container Engine) (GKE), Google App Engine (GAE) and Google Cloud Functions (GCF). Today, we are going to have a discussion on GKE vs GCE.

Recently, one of our customers approached us with a request to suggest to him the best among GKE and GCE. The client wanted complete control over every aspect of container orchestration, from networking to storage, to setting up observability. As the client needed that level of cluster configuration and monitoring, our Support Engineers suggested he GKE.

Based on the requirements of our customers, we suggest the best as both GKE and GCE have their pros and cons.

What makes GKE different from GCE?

Let’s now check on the major differences between Kubernetes Engine and the Cloud Engine solutions from Google.

GCE is Google’s IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) offering. GCE allows you to create your own virtual machine by allocating hardware-specific resources, e.g. RAM, CPU, Storage. It’s almost like building our own computer/workstation and handle all the details of running it.

Whereas, GKE is GCP’s Container as a Service (CaaS) offering, which allows customers to easily run their Docker containers in a fully managed Kubernetes environment. (Kubernetes performs the automation, management, and deployment of containers)

Containers are those which help modularize services/applications. It is a package of all our code and its dependencies. So, it runs faster and is more reliable when used on different platforms. GKE is a step up from Compute Engine.

However, we can’t choose one over the other as these two have their own pros and cons.

What are the pros and cons of GKE and GCE?

As we already saw, GKE and GCE have their own pros and cons. Let’s now see top ones.

Pros or benefits

To begin with let’s look at the major advantages that our Cloud Engineers see in GKE and GCE.

Organizations mainly use GKE to create or resize Docker container clusters, Update and upgrade container clusters, etc. A cluster is a group of servers and other resources that act like a single system and enable high availability. And, Users can interact with GKE using the gcloud command-line interface or the GCP Console.

Kubernetes Engine autoscaling allows handling the increased user demand for our services, keeping them available when it matters most. In the quiet periods, it scales back in order to save money. Thus it comes advantageous to providers who have a varied customer base.

Whereas, Compute Engine enables users to launch VMs on demand. VMs are usually launched from the standard images or custom images created by users and GCE is mainly managed through the CLI or web console. GCE allows administrators to select the region and zone to store and use certain data resources.

Cons of GKE and GCE

As we already discussed the bright side of both GKE and GCE, let’s move on to some of their drawbacks.

GCE has some drawbacks including an outage clause in SLA, response-time to notify customers of the breach. Google mainly relies on a web-based series with a more Do It Yourself approach to resolving issues.

One of the disadvantages of GKE is that it is a little costlier than GCE VM. Also, configuring GKE may not appear easy for all users. It requires complex, manual cluster configuration.

[Having trouble in choosing among GKE vs GCE? – Our Experts are available 24/7.]

Conclusion

In conclusion, our Cloud Engineers always choose best for our customers based on the requirement of the customer, especially when there is conflict in making the decision on choosing the best among GKE and GCE. In today’s write-up, we discussed this topic in detail and saw how we choose among GKE vs GCE.