GKE 1 charges the same $0.10 per cluster-hour, but each billing account receives $74.40 of credit a month, exactly 744 hours: one zonal Standard or Autopilot cluster runs its control plane free. The SLA is 99.95% for Autopilot and regional control planes, 99.5% for a zonal one. The modes differ in who owns the nodes:
Standard: you create node pools and pay for their Compute Engine VMs per second, full or empty.
Autopilot: Google runs the nodes and bills general-purpose Pods for their resource requests: in us-central1, $0.0445 per vCPU-hour and $0.0049225 per GiB-hour ($0.0133 per vCPU-hour for Spot Pods).
Release channels upgrade clusters automatically: on 26 September 2026 Rapid carries 1.37 (since 2 September), Regular 1.36 and Stable 1.35. A minor keeps standard support for about 14 months; the Extended channel stretches that to about 24, at $0.50 an hour more ($0.60 in total) during the extra period.
gcloud container clusters create-auto booknest --location=us-central1 --project=PROJECT_ID
gcloud container clusters create booknest-std --location=us-central1-a --project=PROJECT_ID \
--release-channel=regular --num-nodes=2 --machine-type=e2-medium
gcloud container clusters get-credentials booknest --location=us-central1 --project=PROJECT_IDAutopilot is stricter than kind 14,561 : its admission policy applies the Baseline Pod Security Standard with a few changes (BookNest's namespace already enforces it, Pod Security Admission), refuses privileged containers and writable host-path volumes, and drops NET_RAW from every container.