Support for virtual node pools and virtual nodes

You can now create virtual node pools and virtual nodes with Container Engine for Kubernetes.

Virtual nodes provide a serverless Kubernetes experience, enabling you to run containerized applications at scale without the operational overhead of managing, scaling, upgrading, and troubleshooting the node infrastructure. Virtual nodes provide granular pod-level elasticity and pay-per-use pricing. As a result, you can scale deployments without taking into consideration the cluster's capacity, simplifying the execution of scalable workloads such as high-traffic web applications and data-processing jobs. You create virtual nodes by creating virtual node pools in enhanced clusters.

Virtual node pools and virtual nodes are only available with enhanced clusters.

For more information, see Working with Virtual Nodes.