Is it possible to have Google Cloud Kubernetes cluster in the free tier?

Question

Looking over the Free Tier characteristics for Google Cloud, it states that -

• VM instances must be in a region like us-west1
• VM machine types must be f1-micro

So, to tie that together I created the following shell command to create a Kube.netes cluster -

gcloud container clusters create free-cluster-1 -m f1-micro --region us-west1 

Which attempts to create a cluster named free-cluster-1 with the free tier machine type, and in the free tier region.

However, I get back this error message when running that command -

ERROR: (gcloud.container.clusters.create) ResponseError: code=400, message=Node pools of f1-micro machines are not supported due to insufficient memory.

Does this mean that you simply can't create Kube.netes clusters in the free tier for Google Cloud? Or is there another way around this limitation?

Answer 1

Unfortunately you're not able to create GKE cluster based on f1-micro shared-core machine type.

Have a look at the documentation Choosing a minimum CPU platform section Limitations :

Minimum CPU platform cannot be used with shared core machine types, such as g1-small .

So, because f1-micro shared-core machine type has even less resources than g1-small the error you've got should be expected.

In addition, have a look at the error message:

ERROR: (gcloud.container.clusters.create) ResponseError: code=400, message=Node pools of f1-micro machines are not supported due to insufficient memory.

it's clearly states that "f1-micro machines are not supported due to insufficient memory".