Skip to main content
Compliance · High severity

GKE Cluster Not Private

Nodes carry public addresses, so they are directly reachable from the internet rather than only through your ingress.

Sign inExplore the playground

Free to start. No card. The playground just needs your work email.

Google Cloudprovider
Highseverity
Compliancewhere it shows up
Manualfix, steps written out

Google CloudKubernetes

Found, explained, handed over.

Where the estate departs from your policies, frameworks and tagging rules.

01

Detect

ZopNight checks this automatically across Google Cloud, with read-only access to the account.

02

Explain

Every finding says exactly what to change: Recreate GKE cluster with private nodes.

03

Fix

The finding opens with the fix already written out, step by step, so it is one ticket, not an investigation.

Applies to
GKE Clusters on Google Cloud
The fix, by hand
  1. GKE does not support converting an existing public cluster to private nodes in place. Plan a recreate.
  2. Create a replacement cluster with private nodes: gcloud container clusters create ‹new› --enable-private-nodes --enable-ip-alias --master-ipv4-cidr=172.16.0.0/28 --enable-master-authorized-networks --master-authorized-networks=‹office-cidr› --location=‹loc›.
  3. Optionally use --enable-private-endpoint for fully private control plane (requires VPN/peering for kubectl).
  4. Migrate workloads via Backup for GKE, kubectl apply -k, or a blue/green deployment.
  5. Update CI/CD to use the new control-plane endpoint and master-authorized-networks.
  6. Delete the old public cluster once traffic is fully cut over.

These are the steps the finding carries in the product.

Category
Compliance. Configuration drift from best practice: public access, missing MFA, unencrypted storage, deprecated runtimes.
Where it appears
The Compliance tab of Recommendations, with every affected resource listed.
Rule ID
RC-1222
Full reference

GKE Cluster Not Private

Related checks

GKE Control Plane Master Authorized Networks DisabledGoogle CloudCluster Network Policy Not EnforcedAWS, Google CloudGKE Cluster Logging DisabledGoogle CloudGKE Cluster Monitoring DisabledGoogle CloudGKE Cluster Alias IPs Not EnabledGoogle CloudGKE Node Auto-Upgrade Not ConfiguredGoogle Cloud

See the compliance findings in your account.

Connect a read-only role and the first pass runs on your own estate. This check, and the rest of the catalogue, with it.

Start freeExplore the playground

Prefer to talk it through first? Book 20 minutes with the team.

  • $30M+annualised cloud spend under management
  • 550K+resources tracked since launch
  • 20-60%off the bill in the first month
  • SOC 2Type II report, plus ISO 27001

Figures published on zop.dev.

Multi-cloud automation· Production-ready in 30 min· SOC 2 · ISO 27001· 20–60% off the bill, first month· 4 platforms · 1 console· Multi-cloud automation· Production-ready in 30 min· SOC 2 · ISO 27001· 20–60% off the bill, first month· 4 platforms · 1 console·