Stay organized with collections Save and categorize content based on your preferences.
This page explains how to manually resize Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Standard clusters. You can resize a cluster to increase or decrease the number of nodes in that cluster. Alternatively, you can autoscale your cluster, where GKE automatically resizes your node pools in response to changing conditions, such as changes in your workloads and resource usage.
These instructions don't apply to GKE Autopilot clusters, which automatically resize based on the number of Pods in the cluster.
When you add or remove nodes in your cluster, GKE adds or removes the associated virtual machine (VM) instances from the underlying Compute Engine Managed Instance Groups (MIGs) provisioned for your node pools. For removing nodes, do not use kubectl delete node
as this does not delete the Compute Engine VM instance in the node pool's underlying MIG. Use cluster autoscaler or manually decrease the size of your cluster.
Before you start, make sure that you have performed the following tasks:
gcloud components update
. Note: For existing gcloud CLI installations, make sure to set the compute/region
property. If you use primarily zonal clusters, set the compute/zone
instead. By setting a default location, you can avoid errors in the gcloud CLI like the following: One of [--zone, --region] must be supplied: Please specify location
. You might need to specify the location in certain commands if the location of your cluster differs from the default that you set.When you increase the size of a cluster, the following changes occur:
Existing Pods are not moved to the new instances.
To increase the size of a cluster's node pools, run the gcloud container clusters resize
command:
gcloud container clusters resize CLUSTER_NAME --node-pool POOL_NAME \ --num-nodes NUM_NODES
Replace the following:
CLUSTER_NAME
: the name of the cluster to resize.POOL_NAME
: the name of the node pool to resize.NUM_NODES
: the number of nodes in the pool in a zonal cluster. If you use multi-zonal or regional clusters, NUM_NODES
is the number of nodes for each zone the node pools is in.Repeat this command for each node pool. If your cluster has only one node pool, omit the --node-pool
flag.
To increase the size of a cluster's node pools, perform the following steps:
Go to the Google Kubernetes Engine page in the Google Cloud console.
Beside the cluster you want to edit, click more_vert Actions, then click Edit.
Click the Nodes tab next to the Details tab.
In the Node Pools section, click the name of the node pool that you want to increase in size.
Click edit Resize.
In the Number of nodes field, enter how many nodes that you want in the node pool, and then click Resize.
Repeat for each node pool as needed.
When you decrease the size of a cluster, the following changes occur:
PodDisruptionBudget
and terminationGracePeriodSeconds
are both respected for up to one hour.The MIG does not differentiate between instances running Pods and instances without Pods. Resizing down removes instances at random.
To learn how to add node pools and to manage existing ones, refer to Adding and managing node pools.
gcloudTo decrease the size of a cluster's node pools, run the gcloud container clusters resize
command:
gcloud container clusters resize CLUSTER_NAME --node-pool POOL_NAME \ --num-nodes NUM_NODES
Replace the following:
CLUSTER_NAME
: the name of the cluster to resize.POOL_NAME
: the name of the node pool to resize.NUM_NODES
: the number of nodes in the pool in a zonal cluster. If you use multi-zonal or regional clusters, NUM_NODES
is the number of nodes for each zone the node pools is in.Repeat this command for each node pool. If your cluster has only one node pool, omit the --node-pool
flag.
To decrease the size of a cluster's node pools, perform the following steps:
Go to the Google Kubernetes Engine page in the Google Cloud console.
Beside the cluster you want to edit, click more_vert Actions, then click Edit.
Click the Nodes tab next to the Details tab.
In the Node Pools section, click the name of the node pool that you want to decrease in size.
Click edit Resize.
In the Number of nodes field, enter how many nodes that you want in the node pool, and then click Resize.
Repeat for each node pool as needed.
GKE's cluster autoscaler feature automatically resizes your node pools in response to changing conditions, such as changes in your workloads and resource usage.
To learn more about how autoscaling works, refer to the cluster autoscaler documentation. To set up autoscaling for your cluster, see Autoscaling a cluster.
What's nextExcept as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies. Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
Last updated 2025-08-12 UTC.
[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Hard to understand","hardToUnderstand","thumb-down"],["Incorrect information or sample code","incorrectInformationOrSampleCode","thumb-down"],["Missing the information/samples I need","missingTheInformationSamplesINeed","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],["Last updated 2025-08-12 UTC."],[],[]]
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.4