Node pools and pod autoscaling
A node pool is Standard mode's own instance-group equivalent, and three distinct autoscalers each scale a genuinely different dimension inside Kubernetes.
Speaker notes
- A node pool is Standard mode's direct equivalent of a managed instance group — its own machine type, autoscaling range, and upgrade policy, independent of other pools in the same cluster. Multiple pools let one cluster host workloads with different resource profiles without over- or under-provisioning a single shared machine type.
- Horizontal Pod Autoscaler scales the number of Pod replicas (available on both Autopilot and Standard) — directly analogous to a MIG's own autoscaling policy from the previous chapter. Vertical Pod Autoscaler scales a Pod's own CPU/memory requests.
- Cluster Autoscaler scales the number of nodes and exists only on Standard — Autopilot collapses this second layer away entirely as part of its own management, which is exactly the operational-simplicity trade-off the mode-choice slide described.
Deck map
01
GCP foundations in one line
02
How the ACE exam maps to this course
03
GCP's geography and the project as the unit of isolation
04
Organization, folders, and projects
05
Org policies and how inheritance works
06
Labels, network tags, and resource manager tags
07
Billing accounts, budgets, and cost control
08
gcloud CLI, Cloud Shell, and client libraries
09
Terraform on GCP and the end of Deployment Manager
10
Gemini CLI, Cloud Assist, and Application Design Center
11
Principals, roles, bindings, and policies
12
Primitive, predefined, custom roles, and IAM conditions
13
Service accounts, keys, and impersonation
14
Workload Identity Federation
15
Break-glass access and IAM auditing
16
Choosing a machine family: E2, N4, C4
17
Disks, OS Login, and VM Manager
18
Spot VMs and managed instance groups
19
Autoscaling policies, health checks, GPUs and TPUs
20
GKE Autopilot vs Standard vs the 2026 hybrid option
21
Node pools and pod autoscaling
22
Cloud Run revisions, traffic splitting, and functions
23
Choosing between GKE, Cloud Run, and Compute Engine
24
Cloud Storage classes and lifecycle management
25
Choosing a managed database
26
The managed database lineup
27
Connection pooling, read replicas, and Pub/Sub
28
Backup, regional failover, and CMEK
29
VPC networks, subnets, and Shared VPC
30
Firewall rules, tags, and Cloud NAT
31
Load balancers, Cloud DNS, and Cloud CDN
32
VPN, Interconnect, and private access
33
How a request actually reaches shipment-api
34
Cloud Monitoring: metrics, dashboards, alerts
35
Cloud Logging: router, buckets, and audit logs
36
Trace, Profiler, Error Reporting, and Managed Prometheus
37
How the five Cloud Operations products fit together
38
Readiness checklist