Benefits of building applications that are optimised for cost and value on GKE

The cloud offers modern technologies for compute, storage, databases, machine learning and artificial intelligence with which applications can be built that give businesses an edge in their operations. Like any state of the art technology there are associated costs that weigh on the minds of business executives making them wonder if the technological edge that the cloud promises can be justified by the benefits.

The labs in the quest, Optimize Costs for GKE, show tools and techniques to help optimise resource usage and eliminate unnecessary costs. The skills learned in this quest when combined with the skills learned in the quest, Secure Workloads in GKE, can be applied to build a WordPress application which is designed to be reliable, secure, highly scalable and highly available. What does this mean?

Well, if you plan to build a blog or website where you expect a few hundred visitors per day then the type of application I am describing here might sound a bit like over-engineering to you.

However, if you plan to use WooCommerce to build an eCommerce website or if you are a Linda Ikeji whose blog, lindaikejisblog.com, can expect to receive 10,000 users per minute one minute and then 100,000 users per minute ten minutes later then the technology described here is recommended to avoid poor user experience or even the web server crashing altogether when many people are visiting it at the same time. 

GKE can be used to build web applications that scale and are cost optimised. For example, a website can use two servers to handle 10,000 users per minute and if web traffic grows suddenly, GKE can be configured to automatically spin up additional servers to handle the increased traffic without impacting user experience. If on the other hand web traffic drops from 100,000 users per minute to 100 users per minute, GKE can automatically scale servers down from 10 to 2. 

This way the application only uses the resources it needs to serve users and the business only pays for the resource it needs to satisfy customers and meet business expectations.