Node pools isolate compute policy; Spot trades continuity for price

In Standard, node pools group machine type, image, taints, labels and upgrade policy. Spot VMs suit interruptible work when Pods tolerate eviction and capacity loss.

Pool	Best fit	Required workload design
General	Steady web and service workloads	Requests, spread and disruption budgets
Spot	Batch, asynchronous workers and fault-tolerant stateless replicas	Checkpointing, priority and fallback capacity
Accelerator	GPU or TPU model serving and jobs	Device requests, compatible region and quota
Isolation	Sensitive or licensed workloads	Taints, tolerations and admission policy

A node pool is an infrastructure policy boundary, not an application environment label.

Node pools and Spot is easiest to understand by separating the Kubernetes contract from the Google Cloud implementation. Standard node pools let operators choose machine and lifecycle settings. Spot VMs can be reclaimed and should be mixed with durable capacity when the service cannot tolerate simultaneous loss. The Kubernetes objects stay familiar, but GKE supplies controllers, infrastructure and safe defaults around them. This is why a team can move from an on-premises cluster without rewriting every workload, while still needing to redesign networking, identity and operational ownership for the cloud environment.

A useful inspection step is `gcloud container node-pools list --cluster shopwave-prod --region europe-west1`. Read the output as evidence, not as a ritual: first confirm the desired object exists, then look at status conditions, events and the Google Cloud resource it represents. In production, capture the expected result in a runbook or automated check so an operator can distinguish slow reconciliation from a configuration error.

Production gotcha: A PodDisruptionBudget does not prevent involuntary Spot termination; it only constrains voluntary disruptions. The safe habit is to verify quotas, regional availability and feature support against current Google Cloud documentation before rollout. ComputeClasses can automate pool selection and creation.