This page provides an overview of how fleet creation works, with details for different cluster types. For more information about how to manually register clusters to your fleet and the prerequisites for manual registration, see ourdetailed fleet creation guides.

You can create a fleet in one of the following ways:

• By registering a cluster: When you register a cluster of any type in a project that doesn't already have a fleet, a new fleet is created and the project becomes afleet host project. At most, a project can have a single fleet. Depending on the cluster type and where it lives, registration can happen automatically at cluster creation time with registration details specified in the cluster configuration, or you might need to manually add the cluster to your fleet.
• By creating a named fleet: You cancreate an empty fleet before you register clusters to it.

Each fleet has a name that is displayed in the Google Cloud console. By default, this is the project ID of the fleet host project withfleet appended. If you want a more descriptive name for your fleet, you can specify it when creating a fleet.

About fleet membership

Once you register a cluster to a fleet, it becomes a fleet member. Because fleets can include clusters from multiple projects and environments, you must ensure that each cluster you add to your fleet has a unique name. This is sometimes referred to in commands and documentation as the cluster'sfleet membership name. Typically, a cluster's fleet membership name is its regular cluster name, but you may need to create a new name at registration time (for example by appending or prepending a qualifier to the original cluster name) if another cluster with that name already exists in the fleet. If you attempt to register a cluster with an existing name to your fleet, registration will fail.

Fleet membership location

Each fleet cluster's membership is managed by the Fleet service. The location ofthis service can beglobal orregional, depending on how the cluster isregistered to the fleet.

• GKE clusters on Google Cloudregistered by using the Google Cloud CLIhave their membership managed by a Fleet service instance that runs in the sameregion as the cluster itself. This provides optimal latency for building yourown high availability services, including using regional instances of someservices such as the Connect gateway. Regional membership management alsosupports situations where, for example, you have data that cannot leave aspecific region for regulatory reasons. You cannot choose to have a clustermanaged from a different region.

• GKE clusters on Google Cloudregistered by using Config Connectorcan be managed by either a global or regional Fleet service.

• All other fleet members are managed using a global Fleet service.

A fleet member cluster can be associated with one or more team scopes within its fleet.Team scopesare an enterprise fleet-level construct for associating subsets of fleet clusters with specific application teams, and can be used to enable a range of team-based features, including access control, team-scoped observability, andsequencing cluster upgrade rollouts.

GKE clusters on Google Cloud

GKE clusters on Google Cloud must be explicitly registered to add them to a fleet. To register existing clusters, you can choose between quick registration from the Clusters page in the Google Cloud console, registration from the command line with the gcloud CLI, or declarative registration using Terraform or Config Connector. You can also register new clusters during cluster creation using the Google Cloud console, gcloud CLI, or Terraform. Find out more about these options inRegister a cluster on Google Cloud to your fleet.

Clusters on Google Cloud can be registered to a fleet in their current project or (with some extra permissions) to a fleet in a different project.

Lightweight memberships

GKE clusters on Google Cloud support lightweight memberships, which let you register the cluster as a fleet member without enabling all of the fleet-level configurations and features.

Clusters that use a lightweight membership canuse fleet-based rollout sequencing for cluster upgrades

Lightweight memberships prevent clusters from using the following fleet-level configurations:

• Fleet-level features
• Fleet-level default logs
• Fleet-level default metrics
• Fleet Workload Identity Federation

Clusters outside Google Cloud

You can add clusters outside Google Cloud to your fleet and view and manage your clusters across different environments together. GKE clusters outside Google Cloud are mostly registered to your fleet automatically at cluster creation time, as described in the rest of this section. If you want to add third-party Kubernetes clusters to your fleet, you mustregister them manually.

Registering clusters outside Google Cloud installs the Connect Agent on the cluster to handle communication between the cluster and your Google Cloud project. You can read more about how the Connect Agent works in theConnect Agent overview.

Google Distributed Cloud (on-premises)

On-premises GKE clusterson VMware andon bare metal are automatically registered to your chosen fleet at cluster creation time, with your fleet host project and other registration details specified in the relevant cluster configuration file. If you are using Google Distributed Cloud on VMware, note that from version 1.13 onwards, bothadmin clusters anduser clustersmust be registered. For versions prior to 1.13, you can optionally add registration details toadmin cluster configurations if you want to manage them as part of your fleet. You can register unregistered admin clusters by updating their cluster configuration file and usinggkectl toupdate the cluster. On-premises GKE clusters cannot be unregistered or (with the exception of unregistered admin clusters) manually registered.

GKE on other public clouds

GKE clusters on AWS and Azure created using theGKE Multi-Cloud API are automatically registered to your chosen fleet at cluster creation time, with your fleet host project specified when you run the relevantgcloud cluster create command. Because clusters created using GKE Multi-Cloud already have a project associated with them (the project where the API is enabled), you need todo some additional setup at cluster creation if you want to register them to a fleet in a different project. Clusters created with the GKE Multi-Cloud API cannot be unregistered or manually registered.

Third-party Kubernetes clusters (attached clusters)

If you have existing third-party Kubernetes clusters (such as EKS, AKS, or on-premises distributions) that you want to manage as fleet members, you can register these to your project fleet along with any GKE clusters. You can attach anyconformant Kubernetes cluster that includes x86 nodes to your fleet using the GKE Multi-Cloud API. These include Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, and other CNCF-conformant clusters that meet our requirements. Any third-party clusters you register will incur a per-vCPU charge as part of yourGKE pricing.

To register an attached cluster, see the following guides:

• Attach your EKS cluster.
• Attach your AKS cluster.
• For all other cluster types, follow the instructions toattach CNCF-conformant clusters, paying attention to thecluster prerequisites.

Move a cluster to a different fleet

Moving registered clusters between fleets (unregistering then reregistering) is not currently recommended, as it can result in unexpected or unwanted behavior: for example, your workloads' fleet Workload Identity will change, potentially resulting in blocked requests and outages. The recommended approach is to create a new cluster in the fleet in which you want your workloads to reside, then move your workloads from your old cluster to the new cluster.

(Optional) Create an empty fleet

By default, a new fleet is created in your fleet host project the first time you register a cluster in that project. If you want to create a new named fleet before you register any clusters (for example, toset up scopes for team access), run the following command:

gcloudcontainerfleetcreate--display-name=NAME[--project=FLEET_HOST_PROJECT_ID]

If you don't specify adisplay-name, the new fleet has a default display name based on its fleet host project name.

View your fleets

If your organization has multiple fleets, you can view and navigatebetween them in the Google Cloud console. To view fleets across projects withinyour organization you need theroles/gkehub.viewerrole at the minimum. To learn more, see theKubernetes Engine rolesandhow to grant them.

What's next?

• Plan fleet resources: Before you create your first fleet, read this document for practical guidance on organizing clusters into fleets, including best practices and limitations.

• Before you begin for all cluster types.

• Register a GKE cluster on Google Cloud:

  • Prerequisites for clusters on Google Cloud
  • Register a cluster on Google Cloud to your fleet