Intro

Do you want to set up a Kubernetes cluster in few minutes, run your pods and do not have to think about anything else?

Short answer: Google Kubernetes Engine Autopilot

Let's try

With autopilot mode on GKE we are of course billed only for resource usage of our pods (kube system pods exluded!)

So once created, Total vCPUs and memory shows 0.
Result? We are not paying anything, yet.

And no nodes are available.

Imagine creating a new pod, checking to kubernetes event (k get events), the "scale-up" is triggered.

After few seconds... node is ready!

And from GKE console the Total vCPUs and memory is updated, so we are paying for 0.25 vCPU and 0.5 Memory that are the requested resources from Kubernetes yaml definition.

As "scale-up", also "scale-down" is automatically detected and triggered by the Autopilot mode.

Just delete the pod and ...

We are not billed anymore!

More info –> https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/autopilot-overview?hl=en