GoAlert on GKE Autopilot

GoAlert is an open-source, Apache 2.0-licensed on-call scheduling and incident alert-escalation platform, originally built by Target and run in production at scale. It lets teams define escalation policies, on-call rotations and schedules, and dispatch outbound notifications by email, webhook, or (optionally) Twilio SMS/voice. This module deploys GoAlert on GKE Autopilot on top of the App_GKE foundation, which provisions and manages the shared Google Cloud and Kubernetes infrastructure.

This guide focuses on the cloud services GoAlert uses and how to explore and operate them from the Google Cloud Console and the command line. For the mechanics that are common to every GKE application — Workload Identity, ingress, autoscaling, CI/CD, Cloud Armor, IAP, Binary Authorization, VPC Service Controls, backups, and the deployment lifecycle — refer to the App_GKE foundation guide rather than repeating them here.

---

What GoAlert costs on RAD, and how that compares

Running GoAlert in your own Google Cloud project costs about US$91.31/month in Google Cloud charges, on top of a one-time 110-credit RAD module fee (99 credits — 10% lower — in a RAD-managed project). GoAlert is an open-source on-call scheduling and alert escalation platform, built by Target and running in production at scale. If you deploy into a RAD-managed project, you can pause the whole thing for free and pick it back up later — see "Pause it for free" below.

GoAlert is also available on Cloud Run — see the Cloud Run guide for the lower-cost option; this guide covers the GKE variant.

What you pay on RAD

	Own project	RAD-managed project
Module fee	110 credits (one-time)	99 credits (one-time, 10% lower)
Build time	~3–6 credits (one-time, per build)	~3–6 credits (one-time, per build)
Google Cloud running cost	~US$91.31/month, billed to your own Google billing account at list price	~91 credits/day (~US$9.10/day), metered hourly at list price plus RAD's margin

Default running cost in your own project

Resource	US$/month (Google list price, us-central1)
GKE Autopilot pod, 1x vCPU / 0.5 GiB	US$34.29
Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, 1 vCPU / 3.75 GB, zonal, 10 GB SSD	US$51.02
Cloud NAT and networking	US$5
Cloud Storage (add-ons, backups)	US$1
GKE cluster management fee	shared across every GKE app in the project; $0 if this is your only cluster, else ~73
Total	US$91.31

How it compares

• There is no officially hosted/cloud version of GoAlert to compare against, so the honest comparison is against self-managed infrastructure, not a competing SaaS.
• A bare VPS sized to roughly 1 vCPU / 0.5 GiB — a Hetzner CPX22 (2 vCPU/4GB, ~US$24/mo), a DigitalOcean 2 vCPU/4GB Droplet (US$24/mo), or GCP's own Compute Engine e2-standard-2 (2 vCPU/8GB, ~US$49/mo) — usually undercuts RAD's sticker price; a VPS a size or two smaller would undercut it further.
• What that lower price does not include is the admin's own time: patching the OS, rotating database backups, renewing TLS certificates and watching for downtime. RAD's managed Cloud SQL, Secret Manager and monitoring do that for you, which is the actual trade being made, not the sticker price.
• RAD is not claiming to be cheaper than a bare VPS in cash terms — it usually is not. The case for RAD is what's managed for you.

Pause it for free: delete a RAD-managed project, restore it when you need it

If GoAlert is running in a RAD-managed project, you can stop paying for it entirely without destroying it. Deleting that project first unlinks its billing, then asks Google to delete the project outright — Google's own 30-day recoverable soft delete. Unlike deleting the GoAlert module on its own, this does not tear down Cloud SQL, any VM or the compute resource one by one: the whole project simply stops, and nothing is charged while it waits, because billing is already unlinked.

Restoring, within 30 days and only by the project's owner, asks Google to undelete the project and reattaches its billing account, then asks you to run Update on each deployment to confirm everything came back. Because nothing was individually destroyed, that Update finds the same resources already there — it is a check, not a rebuild, and an Update never charges the module fee again. This costs only a handful of build-time credits in total — roughly 5–10 credits, under US$1, for a typical 2–3-deployment chain. The 99-credit module fee is not charged again.

What this needs: you must own the project (not one RAD only manages billing for), you must restore it yourself within 30 days — after that Google deletes it for good — and restoring is admitted like creating a new project, so your purchased credit balance must still clear the tier's floor (100 credits for the sandbox tier most study/demo use fits). Google says most services are fully working again within 36 hours of a restore.

One real gap: nightly backups are written to a bucket inside the project, and that bucket has Cloud Storage's soft-delete explicitly turned off, so it is very likely gone as soon as you delete the project — even though the project itself is recoverable for 30 days. If you have customised GoAlert and want to keep that work, copy a backup out (to Google Drive, or a bucket outside the project) before deleting. For a default install with nothing irreplaceable in it, this does not matter.

Pay only while you use it, the other way: delete and redeploy

If GoAlert is in your own project (or more than 30 days have passed on a RAD-managed one), the way to stop paying is to delete the deployment and redeploy later when you need it again.

A redeploy costs the module fee again, plus the builds: roughly 110 + ~3–6 credits (~US$11.45) in your own project, or 99 + ~3–6 credits on a RAD-managed one.

Deleting only saves money once GoAlert would otherwise sit unused long enough to clear that redeploy cost against its own running cost: roughly about 4 days or more idle in your own project (against its ~US$91.31/month Google Cloud bill), or about 2 days or more idle in a RAD-managed project (against its ~91 credits/day).

Most of GoAlert's running cost is the database and the shared file/cache VM. They stop only when nothing else in the project uses them, so deleting this app while something else shares the project saves only this app's own compute share of the total above.

Keep data first: nightly backups go to a bucket inside the deployment and are deleted with it, so copy the latest backup out before deleting if you want to keep it.

Lab sessions and Managed Environments

• Lab sessions, for training: a trainer runs a session for a class. Each participant gets the app in their own Google Cloud project for 15 minutes to 24 hours, within an allowance the trainer sets. Either the trainer funds every place, or each participant pays for their own. Everything is deleted when the session ends and unused credits go back to the trainer.
• Managed Environments, for consultancies: a partner runs the app for a client from a ring-fenced wallet it funds, and settles with the client directly. If the wallet runs low, billing pauses and the data is kept, so nobody receives an unexpected charge. At the end the partner hands the project over and the deployments become the client's own.
• Credits can be bought in more than 20 currencies, including XAF, XOF, NGN, GHS, KES and ZAR, by card, bank transfer or mobile money.

Sources (8 October 2026): Google Cloud Billing Catalog API list prices; radmodules.dev/pricing for RAD's own fees and daily-credit estimates; Google's project delete/restore docs for the pause/restore mechanics.

1. Overview

GoAlert runs as a single Go binary pod on GKE Autopilot. The deployment wires together a focused set of Google Cloud services:

Capability	Google Cloud service	Notes
Compute	GKE Autopilot	Go binary pod, 1 vCPU / 512 MiB by default, min_instance_count = 1, max_instance_count = 1
Database	Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL (POSTGRES_17)	Required — GoAlert does not support MySQL or other engines; pgcrypto extension installed automatically
Secrets	Secret Manager	Auto-generated admin password and a data-encryption key; database password managed by the foundation
Ingress	Cloud Load Balancing	External LoadBalancer Service by default, optional custom domain + managed certificate

There is no object storage row in this table — GoAlert_Common's storage_buckets output is always []. GoAlert has no file-upload/attachment feature; every piece of application state (escalation policies, schedules, alerts, notification history, users) lives in PostgreSQL.

Sensible defaults worth knowing up front:

• PostgreSQL is mandatory. database_type = "POSTGRES_17" is fixed by GoAlert_Common; selecting any other engine breaks startup.
• application_database_name / application_database_user default to "admin", not "goalert". This variant wires db_name/db_user in GoAlert_Common from the generic App_GKE-level application_database_name / application_database_user variables, whose module-level defaults are "admin" — inconsistent with the Cloud Run variant's db_name/db_user variables (default "goalert"). Cosmetic, but worth knowing before you go looking in Cloud SQL for a database named goalert.
• A single, always-warm pod. min_instance_count = 1, max_instance_count = 1 — GoAlert runs a continuous in-process "engine" loop that evaluates escalation-policy timing, rotation state, and outbound notification dispatch; there is no scale-to-zero concept on GKE in this module, and a single instance matches GoAlert's own recommendation against running multiple default-mode engine instances without a --api-only topology this module doesn't wire.
• No Redis, no object storage. GoAlert's state lives entirely in PostgreSQL; it needs no external cache, queue, or file storage.
• GOALERT_DB_URL is assembled at container start, not at plan time. GoAlert accepts only a single Postgres connection-string env var, and the runtime Secret-Manager-sourced DB_PASSWORD can't be URL-encoded until the container actually starts — entrypoint.sh (and each init-job script) builds it from the discrete DB_* values the Foundation injects, branching on whether the resolved host is the cloud-sql-proxy loopback (127.0.0.1, no TLS) or a real socket/IP.
• public_url is resolved at boot when left empty. This module passes public_url = var.public_url straight through with no Terraform-side fallback; when it is empty, the entrypoint sets GOALERT_PUBLIC_URL from the platform-injected GKE_SERVICE_URL. That value drives OIDC/CSRF-referer validation and the integration-key URLs GoAlert hands your monitoring systems, so set public_url explicitly only when users reach GoAlert at a different address (for example a custom domain).

---

2. Google Cloud Services & How to Explore Them

All commands assume you have run gcloud container clusters get-credentials <cluster> --region <region> --project <project> and that PROJECT, REGION, and NAMESPACE are set. The namespace and other identifiers are reported in the deployment Outputs.

A. GKE Autopilot — the GoAlert workload

GoAlert runs as a single always-on pod on Autopilot (min = max = 1), which bills for the CPU/memory the pod actually requests.

• Console: Kubernetes Engine → Workloads → select the GoAlert workload to see pods, revisions, and events. Kubernetes Engine → Services & Ingress shows the external IP.
• CLI:

  kubectl get pods,svc -n "$NAMESPACE"
  kubectl logs -n "$NAMESPACE" deploy/<service-name> --tail=100

See App_GKE for how Autopilot and the workload type (Deployment vs StatefulSet) are managed.

B. Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL

GoAlert stores all application data — escalation policies, schedules, rotations, alerts, notification history, and users — in a managed Cloud SQL PostgreSQL instance. Pods reach it privately through the Cloud SQL Auth Proxy sidecar over a loopback TCP connection (127.0.0.1); entrypoint.sh detects this and skips the Unix-socket branch used on Cloud Run.

• Console: SQL → select the instance for connections, backups, flags, and metrics.
• CLI:

  gcloud sql instances list --project "$PROJECT"
  gcloud sql instances describe <instance-name> --project "$PROJECT"
  gcloud sql connect <instance-name> --user=<db-user> --database=<db-name> --project "$PROJECT"

The instance name, database name, user, and the Secret Manager secret holding the password are all surfaced in the Outputs. See App_GKE for the connection model, automated backups, and password rotation.

C. Secret Manager

Two secrets are generated automatically by GoAlert_Common and stored in Secret Manager: the admin password (consumed by the admin-bootstrap init job) and a data-encryption key (recommended by upstream GoAlert docs). The database password is managed separately by the foundation.

• Console: Security → Secret Manager.
• CLI:

  gcloud secrets list --project "$PROJECT" --filter="name~goalert"
  gcloud secrets versions access latest --secret=<admin-password-secret-id> --project "$PROJECT"

D. Networking & ingress

By default the workload is exposed through an external Cloud Load Balancing IP (service_type = LoadBalancer). A custom domain with a Google-managed certificate can be enabled, and a static IP can be reserved so the address survives redeploys.

• Console: Network services → Load balancing; VPC network → IP addresses.
• CLI:

  kubectl get svc -n "$NAMESPACE"
  gcloud compute addresses list --project "$PROJECT"

See App_GKE for custom domains, Cloud CDN, and static IP details.

E. Cloud Logging & Monitoring

Pod stdout/stderr flow to Cloud Logging; GKE and Cloud SQL metrics flow to Cloud Monitoring, with optional uptime checks and alert policies.

• Console: Logging → Logs Explorer; Monitoring → Dashboards / Alerting.
• CLI:

  gcloud logging read 'resource.type="k8s_container" AND resource.labels.namespace_name="'"$NAMESPACE"'"' \
    --project "$PROJECT" --limit 50

---

3. GoAlert Application Behaviour

• The 3-stage initialization job chain is load-bearing. GoAlert_Common defines three ordered Kubernetes Jobs, each depending on the one before it, all with execute_on_apply = true:

  1. db-init (postgres:15-alpine) — creates the PostgreSQL role and database.
  2. db-migrate (goalert/goalert:<version>, depends_on_jobs = ["db-init"]) — runs goalert migrate --db-url=..., applying GoAlert's own schema. This must run before admin-bootstrap: goalert add-user has no migration logic of its own, and on a fresh database it fails with relation "auth_basic_users" does not exist.
  3. admin-bootstrap (goalert/goalert:<version>, depends_on_jobs = ["db-migrate"]) — runs goalert add-user --admin directly against Postgres to create the first admin login.

  On GKE, execute_on_apply = false only stops Terraform from waiting for a job to finish — the underlying Kubernetes Job/pod is still created and scheduled immediately either way. Correctness here relies on depends_on_jobs (App_GKE's 3-tier job dependency system), not on apply-time sequencing. All three scripts also retry internally (up to 10 attempts, 5s apart) to absorb Cloud SQL/scheduling latency.

• No first-visit setup wizard. GoAlert has no web-based initial-admin flow — the admin-bootstrap job is the only way an admin account gets created. Retrieve the generated password:

  gcloud secrets versions access latest --secret=<admin_password_secret_id output>

• Health endpoint. /health is GoAlert's documented public, unauthenticated endpoint (200 once the app lifecycle leaves the "Starting" state). This module's startup and liveness probes default to a TCP port check rather than an HTTP path check — Kubernetes supports tcpSocket for both probe types (unlike Cloud Run, which forbids a TCP liveness probe) — and both proved correct on live verification (HTTP 200 on /health with real "listening and serving HTTP" log lines).

• Inspect job execution:

  kubectl get jobs -n "$NAMESPACE"
  kubectl logs -n "$NAMESPACE" job/<job-name>

---

4. Configuration Variables

Variables are grouped exactly as they appear on the deployment platform. Only settings specific to or notable for GoAlert are listed; every other input is inherited from App_GKE with its standard behaviour and defaults.

Group 1 — Project & Identity

Variable	Default	Description
project_id	(required)	Target Google Cloud project.
region	us-central1	Region for the workload and regional resources.

Group 2 — Deployment Environment

Variable	Default	Description
tenant_id	demo	Short suffix that makes resource names unique per environment. Use a distinct value (e.g. gke) from any co-deployed GoAlert_CloudRun (cr) to avoid a naming collision.
support_users	[]	Emails granted project access and monitoring alerts.
resource_labels	{}	Labels applied to all resources.

Group 3 — Application & Database Identity

Variable	Default	Description
application_name	goalert	Base name for resources. Do not change after first deploy.
application_display_name	GoAlert	Human-readable name shown in the Console.
application_version	latest	Image tag. "latest" maps to a pinned Dockerfile build arg (GOALERT_VERSION = v0.34.1).
admin_username	admin	Username created by the admin-bootstrap init job.
admin_email	admin@techequity.cloud	Email for the initial admin account.
public_url	""	Left empty, resolved at boot from the platform-injected GKE_SERVICE_URL. Set explicitly only if users reach GoAlert at another address (e.g. a custom domain).

Group 4 — Runtime & Scaling

Variable	Default	Description
deploy_application	true	Set false to provision infrastructure only.
container_resources	{ cpu_limit="1000m", memory_limit="512Mi" }	CPU/memory requests and limits.
container_port	8081	GoAlert's native HTTP port.
min_instance_count	1	Minimum pod replicas.
max_instance_count	1	Single default-mode engine instance; multi-instance needs a --api-only topology this module doesn't wire.
enable_cloudsql_volume	true	Cloud SQL Auth Proxy sidecar.
enable_image_mirroring	true	Mirrors the GoAlert base image into Artifact Registry.

Group 9 — GKE Backend Configuration

Variable	Default	Description
service_type	LoadBalancer	How the Kubernetes Service is exposed.
workload_type	null (resolves to Deployment)	"Deployment" or "StatefulSet".
session_affinity	ClientIP	Session affinity for the Kubernetes Service.
namespace_name	"" (auto-generated)	Kubernetes namespace.

Group 16/17 — Database Configuration

Variable	Default	Description
database_type	POSTGRES_17	Cloud SQL engine. GoAlert requires PostgreSQL.
application_database_name	admin	PostgreSQL database name — see the naming-inconsistency note in Overview.
application_database_user	admin	PostgreSQL application user.
database_password_length	32	Generated password length (16–64).

Group 11/12 — Workload Automation

Variable	Default	Description
initialization_jobs	[]	Leave empty for GoAlert_Common's default 3-job chain (db-init → db-migrate → admin-bootstrap).
cron_jobs	[]	GoAlert has no platform-scheduled recurring tasks by default.

Group 22 — Observability & Health

Variable	Default	Description
startup_probe_config	TCP, 30s delay, 30 retries	Accommodates first-boot migration latency (db-migrate).
health_check_config	TCP, 30s delay, 3 retries	Kubernetes liveness probe.
uptime_check_config	{ enabled=false, path="/health" }	Cloud Monitoring uptime check.

Group 15 — Redis

Variable	Default	Description
enable_redis	false	Not required by GoAlert; present for platform compatibility.

Group 19 — Custom Domain, Static IP & Networking

Variable	Default	Description
enable_custom_domain	true	Provision Ingress for custom hostnames.
reserve_static_ip	true	Reserve a stable global static IP for the load balancer — recommended so public_url doesn't need to change after every redeploy.

Every other input (Module Metadata, Environment Variables & Secrets, CI/CD & GitHub Integration, Custom SQL, Storage & Filesystem, IAP & Cloud Armor, StatefulSet Configuration, VPC Service Controls, Reliability Policies) is inherited from App_GKE with its standard behaviour — see App_GKE for the full, group-organized list.

---

5. Outputs

Returned on a successful deployment — the quickest way to locate and explore the running resources.

Output	Description
service_name	Kubernetes Service name.
namespace	Namespace the workload runs in.
service_cluster_ip / service_external_ip	In-cluster ClusterIP / external LoadBalancer IP.
service_url	URL to reach GoAlert.
database_instance_name	Cloud SQL instance name.
database_name / database_user	Application database name / user.
database_password_secret	Secret Manager secret holding the DB password.
database_host / database_port	DB endpoint (127.0.0.1 via the Auth Proxy sidecar) / port.
storage_buckets	Always [] — GoAlert provisions no storage buckets.
container_image	Deployed image.
initialization_jobs	Names of the created init jobs (db-init, db-migrate, admin-bootstrap).
kubernetes_ready	Whether the cluster endpoint is available and all workload resources are deployed. false on the first apply of a new inline cluster — a re-run completes the deployment.
deployment_id / tenant_id / resource_prefix	Naming identifiers.
project_id / project_number	Project identifiers.

---

6. Configuration Pitfalls & Sensible Defaults

Risk: Critical (data loss / outage / security) — High (service degraded) — Medium (cost or partial degradation) — Low (minor).

Inherited plan-time validation. This module passes its configuration through the App_GKE foundation engine, which validates values and combinations at plan time. Invalid configuration fails the plan with a clear, named error before any resource is created.

Setting	Sensible value	Risk	Consequence if wrong
database_type	POSTGRES_17	Critical	Any other engine breaks GoAlert's schema and startup entirely — pgcrypto and the whole goalert migrate flow are Postgres-specific.
initialization_jobs order (db-init → db-migrate → admin-bootstrap)	Leave [] unless you fully understand the dependency chain	Critical	Running admin-bootstrap before db-migrate fails with relation "auth_basic_users" does not exist on a fresh database — goalert add-user has no migration logic of its own. On GKE, execute_on_apply=false does NOT delay pod scheduling, only Terraform's wait — the ordering guarantee comes entirely from depends_on_jobs.
public_url	Leave "" (resolved at boot from GKE_SERVICE_URL) or set the real external URL	High	A wrong GOALERT_PUBLIC_URL breaks OIDC auth callbacks, every link in outgoing notifications, and the integration-key URLs your monitoring systems post alerts to.
min_instance_count	1	High	GoAlert's escalation-timing engine is a continuous in-process loop — at zero replicas, escalations for real alerts are silently missed entirely.
application_database_name / application_database_user	Confirm actual values (admin/admin by default, not goalert)	Medium	Looking for a database literally named goalert in Cloud SQL will not find it under this variant's defaults.
enable_cloudsql_volume	true	High	The Auth Proxy sidecar is required for PostgreSQL connectivity on GKE.
reserve_static_ip	true	Medium	Without a reserved static IP, the external LoadBalancer address can change across redeploys, breaking any public_url you've configured.
admin_username / admin_email	Set once, retrieve password from Secret Manager	Medium	GoAlert has no self-service password reset flow visible from Terraform; losing track of the bootstrapped admin credential means using the goalert CLI directly against the database to create a new one.
max_instance_count	1 unless you wire a --api-only topology	Medium	GoAlert supports multiple engine instances safely (not a double-fire bug per upstream docs), but this module has no built-in mechanism to designate --api-only replicas.

---

For the foundation behaviour referenced throughout — Workload Identity, autoscaling, ingress and certificates, CI/CD, Cloud Armor, IAP, Binary Authorization, VPC-SC, backups, and image mirroring — see App_GKE. GoAlert-specific application configuration shared with the Cloud Run variant is described in GoAlert_Common.

Related guides

• Hands-on lab: GoAlert on GKE Autopilot — deploy it step by step, with the console screens and commands at each stage.
• GoAlert on Google Cloud Run — the same application on Cloud Run, for when you need the other deployment target.
• GoAlert Common — Shared Application Configuration — the configuration shared by both deployment targets.