GKE Is Built on Google's Kubernetes Expertise – So Why Is It Still Underutilized?
Cloud Native Now, Tuesday, November 3rd, 2026
Despite GKE features like Autopilot, a 2026 report found average GKE CPU utilization of 8% and widespread overprovisioning of resource requests.
The article notes that Google has run Kubernetes at huge scale, giving GKE capabilities such as Autopilot, but utilization remains low.
The 2026 State of Kubernetes Optimization Report, based on more than 23,000 clusters across AWS, GCP and Azure, found average GKE CPU utilization of 8%, memory 20% and GPU 6%, with 69% of GKE clusters overprovisioning CPU and 79% overprovisioning memory.
The author argues the platform cannot know whether a workload truly needs the resources it requests, so rightsizing requests is the highest-leverage starting point.
It recommends basing requests on actual consumption over a 7 to 14 day window and explains how oversized requests affect cost in Autopilot and node provisioning in Standard mode.