How zones and regions work in GKE

• A regional cluster replicates both the control plane and the nodes across multiple zones within the same region.

• Using multiple zones improves resilience. If a zone experiences issues, GKE can schedule workloads on nodes in healthy zones.

• The control plane is fully managed by GKE and is replicated automatically when you select a regional cluster, providing higher availability.

How Flexera Ocean handles imported regional clusters

When you import a regional GKE cluster into Flexera Ocean:

• The cluster is not integrated with its existing regional node pools.

• The existing instances are registered to Ocean, but Ocean treats the environment as a zonal cluster, not a multi‑zone replicated node pool.

• Ocean does not automatically replicate worker nodes across all zones in the region.

This means that although GKE maintains a regional, multi‑zone control plane, Ocean manages compute capacity at a zonal level.

How Ocean manages autoscaling with zones

Even though Ocean treats the compute layer zonally, it still optimizes for reliability:

• Ocean autoscaler selects the best available markets (zones and instance types) to place new nodes.

• If one zone is experiencing an outage or capacity shortage, Ocean can launch nodes in a different zone to keep workloads running.

• This gives you flexibility and resilience even when the imported cluster isn’t structured as a regional node pool in Ocean.