GKE Adds Reservation Affinity, N4D Machines, and VPA CPU Boost

In GKE version 1.36.0-gke.3204000 and later, when you manually or automatically create a GKE node pool that consumes capacity reservations, you can stop GKE from falling back to on-demand capacity if reserved capacity isn't available. To consume any matching reservation without fallback, specify the any-reservation-then-fail reservation affinity in your node pool creation request, Pod specification, or ComputeClass specification. In ComputeClasses, this reservation affinity lets GKE move on to the next priority rule instead of creating on-demand compute resources. For more information, see Con

GKE version 1.33 now supports the N4D machine series for node pool auto-creation and Autopilot clusters in the following patch versions and later: Node pool auto-creation : 1.33.12-gke.1208000 and later Autopilot : 1.33.13-gke.1079000 and later

In GKE version 1.36.0-gke.4447000 and later, the VerticalPodAutoscaler supports CPU startup boost , which temporarily increases CPU requests during application startup to improve startup latency and cost efficiency. This feature is available in Preview.

Starting on June 30, 2026, the Filestore API ( file.googleapis.com ) is enabled by default when you enable the Kubernetes Engine API ( container.googleapis.com ) in a project. The Filestore API is required for PersistentVolumes that use the ReadWriteMany access mode in GKE .