Use this GKE operating checklist before every production change

The platform is healthy when topology, addresses, identity, capacity, data protection and evidence all agree with the workload objective.

Area	Verify	First evidence
Architecture	Mode, region, channel and ownership	gcloud container clusters describe
Networking	Pod range headroom, private egress, Gateway health	ipAllocationPolicy and Gateway conditions
Security	Workload principal, RBAC, admission and secret path	IAM policy plus kubectl auth can-i
Capacity	Requests, autoscalers, quota and pool ceilings	Pod events, HPA and regional quota
Data	StorageClass, zone scope, backup and restore test	PVC, backup plan and drill result
Operations	Logs, metrics, cost labels and runbooks	Alerts, billing export and incident checklist

A production review is complete only when the workload path and the recovery path are both tested.

GKE cheat sheet is easiest to understand by separating the Kubernetes contract from the Google Cloud implementation. This checklist is deliberately cross-layer. A production change can fail because the Kubernetes object, GKE controller or Google Cloud dependency violates an assumption. 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 clusters describe 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: Checklists decay if they are not linked to current dashboards, queries and owners; rehearse them during game days. The safe habit is to verify quotas, regional availability and feature support against current Google Cloud documentation before rollout. The recap turns the checklist into exit criteria.