Google Kubernetes Engine and Windows - how we deal with it at Egnyte
summary
Egnyte runs a Windows node pool on GKE using a custom Terraform module to provision clusters and a CI pipeline with Helm and Jenkins for deployments; Windows node creation takes ~41 minutes versus minutes for Linux. Images are large (nano not usable; core ≈2 GB) and often require rebuilds for Windows Server compatibility. Missing features include IP masquerade, NetworkPolicy, GPUs, and limited service-mesh support. Monitoring uses Prometheus and Grafana plus Elasticsearch/Filebeat (custom Windows image). The service is running in production.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:33Legacy Windows setup issues
- 4:22GKE Windows limitations
- 8:18Node pool creation delays
- 10:51Image building challenges
- 11:56High availability setup
- 13:27Monitoring and logging
- 16:56Windows updates handling
- 19:08Current problems overview
- 20:31Was it worth it?
- 22:17Cluster usage stats
- 23:20About Egnyte
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