Strapi on GKE Autopilot

Strapi is the leading open-source headless CMS — delivering a fully customisable content API (REST and GraphQL) with a rich admin panel, used by enterprises and developers worldwide for content management and API-first architectures. This module deploys Strapi 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 Strapi uses and how to explore and operate them from the Google Cloud Console and the command line. For the mechanics 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.

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What Strapi costs on RAD, and how that compares

Strapi on RAD's GKE Autopilot module costs about US$104.74 a month in a Google Cloud project you own, with the module fee charged once in RAD credits. GKE suits Strapi that needs to sit beside other Kubernetes workloads; for the lowest cost, the Cloud Run module runs the same Strapi for about US$98.82 a month instead. If you only need Strapi occasionally — a content project between launches, a client site under evaluation — a RAD-managed project can be deleted and restored within 30 days for a handful of credits (under US$1) instead of paying for it to sit idle. See Pause it for free, below. Figures are as at 8 October 2026; sources are listed at the end of this section.

What you pay on RAD

	In a Google Cloud project you own	In a project RAD manages for you
Module fee, once per deployment	110 credits (US$11 at the top-up price)	99 credits (10% lower)
Build time	About 3-6 credits per build	The same
Google Cloud running cost	Billed by Google to your own billing account, about US$104.74 a month for the default configuration (table below)	Metered hourly in credits; RAD publishes 92 credits a day, about 2,760 a month
Who owns what	You own the project and its billing; RAD deploys and updates it	RAD owns the project, with guardrails, quotas and budget alerts; you get console access, and a minimum purchased balance is held in reserve

10 credits cost US$1 on a one-off top-up, and less on a monthly plan. In a project RAD manages, the database, file server and network are shared by every application in the project, so a second application does not add a second set of them.

Default running cost in your own project (us-central1, Google list prices):

Resource (module default)	Per month
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
NFS/cache file server (small VM)	US$13.43
Cloud NAT and networking	US$5.00
Cloud Storage (add-ons, backups)	US$1.00
GKE cluster management fee	shared across every GKE app in the project; $0 if this is your only cluster, else ~73
Total	US$104.74

How it compares

• Strapi's own hosted plan, Strapi Cloud, starts at $35/month (Starter: 100k API requests, 50 GB storage/bandwidth), rising to $90/month (Pro) and $450/month (Business) for more requests and storage (source: strapi.io/pricing-cloud). RAD's own-project figure sits above the Starter plan's sticker price, but it buys the headless CMS plus a dedicated PostgreSQL instance, NFS share and networking you control directly, rather than a usage-metered Strapi-run environment.
• A self-managed comparison: Hetzner CPX22 (2 vCPU/4GB) runs about $24/month, a DigitalOcean 2 vCPU/4GB Droplet is the same $24/month, and a GCP Compute Engine e2-standard-2 (2 vCPU/8GB) is about $49/month — cheaper in cash terms, but none include a managed database, backups or TLS, which you would run and patch yourself.
• Most of RAD's own-project running cost here is the database and the NFS file server, not Strapi's own pod — the same resources any serious CMS deployment needs, managed rather than self-administered.

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

If Strapi runs in a project RAD manages for you, deleting the whole project unlinks its billing first, then asks Google to delete the project outright — Google's own 30-day recoverable soft delete. Unlike deleting one module, this does not tear down Cloud SQL, the NFS 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 credits (under US$1) in total for a typical 2-3-deployment chain.

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 your content types or uploaded assets you want to keep, 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

In your own project, or once the 30-day restore window has passed, the alternative is to delete Strapi outright and redeploy it later. A redeploy costs the module fee again, plus the builds — roughly 115 credits (about US$11.50) in your own project, or 104 credits in a RAD-managed one.

Deleting saves money only once Strapi would otherwise sit unused long enough to clear that redeploy cost against its own daily running cost — against the own-project total above (about US$3.49 a day), that works out to about 4 days or more, or about 2 days or more in a RAD-managed one (92 credits a day). Most of the running cost here is the database and the NFS file server; they stop only when nothing else in the project uses them, so deleting Strapi while something else shares the project saves only this app's own compute part.

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; Delete and restore projects for the pause/restore mechanics; strapi.io/pricing-cloud for Strapi Cloud's hosted plans.

1. Overview

Strapi runs as a Node.js container on GKE Autopilot. The deployment wires together a focused set of Google Cloud services:

Capability	Google Cloud service	Notes
Compute	GKE Autopilot	Node.js pods, 1 vCPU / 512 MiB by default, horizontally autoscaled
Database	Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL 15	Required — Strapi requires PostgreSQL
Shared files	Filestore (NFS)	Media uploads and assets shared across all replicas
Object storage	Cloud Storage	A dedicated uploads bucket (strapi-uploads suffix)
Cache (optional)	Redis / Memorystore	Optional; disabled by default
Secrets	Secret Manager	Five auto-generated cryptographic secrets plus the database password
Ingress	Cloud Load Balancing	External LoadBalancer, optional custom domain + managed certificate

Sensible defaults worth knowing up front:

• PostgreSQL is required. Strapi's data layer is wired to PostgreSQL; MySQL and NONE break startup.
• A custom container image is built via Cloud Build. container_image_source defaults to "custom" — the module builds a production-ready two-stage Node.js 20 image on every version increment.
• Five cryptographic secrets are auto-generated. JWT_SECRET, ADMIN_JWT_SECRET, API_TOKEN_SALT, TRANSFER_TOKEN_SALT, and APP_KEYS are generated and stored in Secret Manager on first deploy and must never change after that — they sign all active sessions and API tokens.
• NFS is enabled by default. Strapi stores uploaded media under /uploads. Without a shared NFS volume, media is lost on pod restart.
• Redis is disabled by default. Enable it only when using plugins that explicitly require a shared cache or session store.
• Container port is 1337. Strapi's HTTP server binds to port 1337 by default.
• GCS media bucket variables are auto-injected — but currently point at the wrong bucket. GCS_BUCKET_NAME and GCS_BASE_URL are set automatically, but Strapi_GKE/strapi.tf computes the bucket name from the tenant-only resource prefix instead of the app-scoped bucket name the Foundation module (App_GKE) actually creates (gcs-${service_name}-strapi-uploads). The injected values therefore reference a bucket that does not exist by default — see Section 3 and the module README's Notes for the fix.

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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 Strapi workload

Strapi pods are scheduled on Autopilot, which bills for the CPU/memory the pods actually request. Horizontal Pod Autoscaling sizes the deployment between the minimum and maximum replica counts.

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

  kubectl get pods,svc,hpa -n "$NAMESPACE"
  kubectl logs -n "$NAMESPACE" deploy/<service-name> --tail=100
  kubectl describe hpa -n "$NAMESPACE"          # current vs target utilisation

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

B. Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL 15

Strapi stores all application data (content types, content, users, API tokens) in a managed Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL 15 instance. Pods reach it privately through the Cloud SQL Auth Proxy sidecar over a Unix socket, so no public IP is exposed. On first deploy an initialization Job creates the application database and user.

• 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"
  # Open an interactive shell to inspect schema/data:
  gcloud sql connect <instance-name> --user=<db-user> --project "$PROJECT"

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

C. Filestore (NFS) and Cloud Storage

Uploaded media is written to a Filestore (NFS) share mounted into every pod so all replicas see the same files. A dedicated Cloud Storage bucket (suffix strapi-uploads) is also provisioned by the Foundation module and the workload service account is granted access to it automatically — but see the known bug in Section 3: the GCS_BUCKET_NAME/GCS_BASE_URL values injected into the container do not currently match this bucket's actual name, so Strapi's GCS upload provider does not connect to it out of the box.

• Console: Filestore → Instances for the NFS share; Cloud Storage → Buckets for the uploads bucket.
• CLI:

  gcloud filestore instances list --project "$PROJECT"
  gcloud storage buckets list --project "$PROJECT"
  gcloud storage ls gs://<uploads-bucket>/        # bucket name is in the Outputs
  # Confirm the NFS share is mounted inside a pod:
  kubectl exec -n "$NAMESPACE" deploy/<service-name> -- df -h | grep -i nfs

See App_GKE for NFS provisioning, GCS Fuse, and CMEK options.

D. Secret Manager

Five Strapi cryptographic secrets are generated on first deploy and stored in Secret Manager: JWT_SECRET, ADMIN_JWT_SECRET, API_TOKEN_SALT, TRANSFER_TOKEN_SALT, and APP_KEYS (four comma-joined keys). The database password is also stored here. All secrets are injected into pods at runtime; plaintext never appears in configuration.

• Console: Security → Secret Manager.
• CLI:

  gcloud secrets list --project "$PROJECT"
  gcloud secrets versions access latest --secret=<secret-name> --project "$PROJECT"

The database password secret name is in the Outputs. See App_GKE for the Secret Store CSI integration and rotation.

E. Redis cache (optional)

When enable_redis = true, Redis is used as a session store and REST API response cache via the strapi-plugin-redis and strapi-plugin-rest-cache plugins. When redis_host is left empty and NFS is enabled, the NFS host IP is used as the Redis endpoint.

• Console: Memorystore → Redis (if using a managed instance).
• CLI:

  redis-cli -h <redis-host> ping
  redis-cli -h <redis-host> info keyspace
  # Confirm Redis env vars are injected into the pod:
  kubectl exec -n "$NAMESPACE" deploy/<service-name> -- env | grep -E "^REDIS|ENABLE_REDIS"

F. Networking & ingress

By default the workload is exposed through an external Cloud Load Balancing IP. 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 ingress,svc -n "$NAMESPACE"
  gcloud compute addresses list --project "$PROJECT"

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

G. Cloud Logging & Monitoring

Pod stdout/stderr flow to Cloud Logging; GKE and Cloud SQL metrics flow to Cloud Monitoring. Optional uptime checks and alert policies are available.

• 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

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3. Strapi Application Behaviour

• First-deploy database setup. An initialization Job runs using postgres:15-alpine and idempotently creates the Strapi database and user, grants the necessary privileges (including CREATEDB, which Strapi's migration system requires), and signals the Cloud SQL Auth Proxy to shut down cleanly.
• GCS media provider — known bucket-name mismatch. GCS_BUCKET_NAME and GCS_BASE_URL are automatically injected into the container, and Strapi's config/plugins.js detects these variables and switches to the @strapi-community/strapi-provider-upload-google-cloud-storage provider. However, Strapi_GKE/strapi.tf builds GCS_BUCKET_NAME as ${resource_prefix}-strapi-uploads using the tenant-only tenant_resource_prefix, while the Foundation module (App_GKE) actually names the created bucket gcs-${service_name}-strapi-uploads (app-scoped). The two names do not match, so by default the injected value points at a bucket that was never created and media uploads fail. (The Strapi_CloudRun sibling does not have this bug — it resolves the bucket name via module.app_cloudrun.storage_buckets["strapi-uploads"].) Until fixed, set GCS_BUCKET_NAME/GCS_BASE_URL explicitly in environment_variables using the real bucket name from this module's storage_buckets output.
• Email delivery (optional). If SMTP_HOST is set in environment_variables, config/plugins.js automatically enables the nodemailer email provider for Strapi notifications (user invitations, password resets, workflow events). Set SMTP_PASSWORD via secret_environment_variables.
• Health probe. Both startup and liveness probes target /_health — a Strapi endpoint that returns 200 only when the application and database connection are ready. The startup probe allows up to ~300 seconds for first-boot initialisation.
• Session affinity. Defaults to ClientIP — recommended because the Strapi admin panel uses persistent WebSocket connections for real-time content updates.
• Cryptographic secrets are immutable after first deploy. All five auto-generated secrets sign active sessions and API tokens. Regenerating any of them immediately invalidates all active sessions and tokens.

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4. Configuration Variables

Variables are grouped exactly as they appear on the deployment platform. Only settings specific to or notable for Strapi 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.
support_users	[]	Emails granted project access and monitoring alerts.
resource_labels	{}	Labels applied to all resources for cost/ownership tracking.

Group 3 — Application Identity

Variable	Default	Description
application_name	strapi	Base name for resources. Do not change after first deploy.
application_display_name	Strapi CMS	Friendly name shown in the Console.
application_description	Strapi Headless CMS on GKE	Workload description annotation.
application_version	5.0.0	Image tag; increment to trigger a new Cloud Build run and workload revision. Does not select the Strapi package version — @strapi/strapi is pinned in Strapi_Common/scripts/package.json (currently 4.24.2) and this variable has no effect on it.

Group 4 — Runtime & Scaling

Variable	Default	Description
deploy_application	true	Set false to provision infrastructure only.
container_image_source	custom	"custom" triggers Cloud Build; "prebuilt" deploys an existing image URI.
container_image	""	Override image URI; leave empty for the module-built image.
container_build_config	{ enabled = true }	Dockerfile path, build context, and build args for Cloud Build.
enable_image_mirroring	true	Mirror image into Artifact Registry before deployment.
min_instance_count	1	Minimum pod replicas.
max_instance_count	10	Maximum pod replicas (autoscaler ceiling).
container_port	1337	Strapi's Node.js server listens on port 1337.
container_resources	{ cpu_limit = "1000m", memory_limit = "512Mi" }	CPU/memory limits and optional requests.
timeout_seconds	300	Max request duration; increase for long media processing operations.
enable_cloudsql_volume	true	Cloud SQL Auth Proxy sidecar for socket connections.
enable_vertical_pod_autoscaling	false	Let Autopilot tune resource requests automatically.

Group 5 — Environment Variables & Secrets

Variable	Default	Description
environment_variables	{}	Extra non-secret settings. GCS_BUCKET_NAME and GCS_BASE_URL are injected automatically, but see the known bucket-name mismatch in Section 3 — override these explicitly if uploads fail.
secret_environment_variables	{}	Map of env var → Secret Manager secret name for additional secrets.
secret_propagation_delay	30	Seconds to wait after secret creation before proceeding.
secret_rotation_period	2592000s	Pub/Sub rotation notification frequency.

Group 6 — GKE Backend & Cluster

Variable	Default	Description
service_type	LoadBalancer	How the Service is exposed.
session_affinity	ClientIP	Sticky routing recommended for Strapi WebSocket admin connections.
workload_type	null	Auto-resolves to StatefulSet when per-pod storage is enabled.
network_tags	["nfsserver"]	Node/pod tags; nfsserver is required for NFS connectivity.
gke_cluster_name	""	Target cluster name; auto-discovered when empty.
namespace_name	""	Kubernetes namespace; auto-generated when empty.

Group 7 — StatefulSet Configuration

Variable	Default	Description
stateful_pvc_enabled	null	Enable per-pod PVCs in a StatefulSet. Not needed for the default NFS-backed setup.
stateful_pvc_size	10Gi	Storage size per PVC. Immutable after creation.
stateful_pvc_mount_path	/data	Container path for the per-pod PVC.
stateful_pvc_storage_class	standard-rwo	StorageClass for PVCs.
stateful_headless_service	null	Create a headless Service for stable pod DNS.
stateful_pod_management_policy	null	OrderedReady or Parallel.
stateful_update_strategy	null	RollingUpdate or OnDelete.

Group 8 — Resource Quota

Variable	Default	Description
enable_resource_quota	false	Cap namespace CPU/memory/object counts.
quota_memory_requests / quota_memory_limits	""	Must use binary units (4Gi, 8192Mi) — bare integers are read as bytes and block scheduling.

Group 9 — Reliability Policies

Variable	Default	Description
enable_pod_disruption_budget	true	Protect availability during node upgrades.
pdb_min_available	1	Raise min_instance_count above 1 if you need eviction headroom.
enable_topology_spread	false	Spread pods across zones.

Group 10 — Observability & Health

Variable	Default	Description
startup_probe_config	HTTP /_health, 10s delay	Startup probe targeting Strapi's health endpoint.
health_check_config	HTTP /_health, 15s delay	Liveness probe targeting Strapi's health endpoint.
uptime_check_config	disabled, path /	Optional Cloud Monitoring uptime check.
alert_policies	[]	Optional metric alert policies.

Group 11 — Jobs & Scheduled Tasks

Variable	Default	Description
initialization_jobs	[]	Leave empty to use the built-in db-init job.
cron_jobs	[]	Recurring Kubernetes CronJobs triggered by Cloud Scheduler.
additional_services	[]	Sidecar or helper GKE services deployed alongside Strapi.

Group 12 — CI/CD & GitHub Integration

Standard App_GKE Cloud Build / Cloud Deploy integration — see App_GKE. Key inputs: enable_cicd_trigger, github_repository_url, github_token, enable_cloud_deploy, enable_binary_authorization.

Group 13 — Filesystem (NFS)

Variable	Default	Description
enable_nfs	true	Shared Filestore volume for Strapi media (keep enabled).
nfs_mount_path	/mnt/nfs	Mount path inside the container.
nfs_volume_name	nfs-data-volume	Kubernetes volume name for the NFS mount.

Group 14 — Cloud Storage & Artifact Registry

Variable	Default	Description
create_cloud_storage	true	Provision GCS buckets.
storage_buckets	[{ name_suffix = "data" }]	Additional buckets beyond the auto-provisioned strapi-uploads bucket.
gcs_volumes	[]	GCS Fuse volume mounts.
manage_storage_kms_iam / enable_artifact_registry_cmek	false	CMEK options.
max_images_to_retain	7	Maximum recent Artifact Registry images to keep.

Group 15 — Redis Cache

Variable	Default	Description
enable_redis	false	Use Redis for caching/sessions (disabled by default).
redis_host	""	Redis endpoint. Leave empty to fall back to the NFS host IP when enable_nfs = true.
redis_port	6379	Redis port.
redis_auth	""	Optional Redis auth password (sensitive).

Group 16 — Database Backend

Variable	Default	Description
database_type	POSTGRES	PostgreSQL is required — do not change to MySQL or NONE.
application_database_name	strapi	Database name. Immutable after first deploy.
application_database_user	strapi	Application user. Immutable after first deploy.
database_password_length	32	Generated password length (16–64).
enable_auto_password_rotation	false	Zero-downtime DB password rotation.
enable_postgres_extensions	false	Install additional PostgreSQL extensions after provisioning.

Group 17 — Backup & Maintenance

Variable	Default	Description
backup_schedule	0 2 * * *	Automated backup cron (UTC).
backup_retention_days	7	Retention; raise to 30–90 for production/compliance.
enable_backup_import / backup_source / backup_file / backup_format	restore options	Restore from a backup on deploy.

Group 18 — Custom SQL Scripts

enable_custom_sql_scripts, custom_sql_scripts_bucket, custom_sql_scripts_path, custom_sql_scripts_use_root — run SQL from a GCS bucket after provisioning. See App_GKE.

Group 19 — Custom Domain, Static IP & Networking

Variable	Default	Description
enable_custom_domain	true	Provision Ingress for custom hostnames + managed certificate.
application_domains	[]	Hostnames to serve.
reserve_static_ip	true	Stable external IP across redeploys.

Group 20 — Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP)

Variable	Default	Description
enable_iap	false	Require Google sign-in in front of Strapi.
iap_authorized_users / iap_authorized_groups	[]	Who may access.
iap_oauth_client_id / iap_oauth_client_secret	""	Required when IAP is enabled (sensitive).

Group 21 — Cloud Armor

Variable	Default	Description
enable_cloud_armor	false	Attach a Cloud Armor (WAF) policy to the Ingress backend.
admin_ip_ranges	[]	CIDRs allowed privileged access.
cloud_armor_policy_name	default-waf-policy	Policy name.
enable_cdn	false	Enable Cloud CDN on the GKE Ingress backend.

Group 22 — VPC Service Controls & Audit Logging

Variable	Default	Description
enable_vpc_sc	false	Enforce a VPC-SC perimeter (requires organization_id).
vpc_cidr_ranges / vpc_sc_dry_run	(set)	Access level CIDRs / dry-run mode.
enable_audit_logging	false	Detailed Cloud Audit Logs.

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5. Outputs

These values are returned on a successful deployment and are 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	In-cluster ClusterIP.
service_external_ip	External LoadBalancer IP (when a static IP is reserved).
service_url	URL to reach Strapi.
database_instance_name	Cloud SQL instance name.
database_name	Application database name.
database_user	Application database 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) / port.
storage_buckets	Created Cloud Storage buckets.
network_name / network_exists / regions	VPC network, presence, available regions.
container_image / container_registry	Deployed image and Artifact Registry repo.
monitoring_enabled / monitoring_notification_channels	Monitoring status and channels.
initialization_jobs / db_import_job	Names of the setup and (optional) import jobs.
deployment_id / tenant_id / resource_prefix	Naming identifiers.
project_id / project_number	Project identifiers.
cicd_enabled / cicd_configuration	CI/CD status and details (repo, trigger, registry).
kubernetes_ready	Whether the cluster/workload is ready.
vpc_sc_enabled / vpc_sc_perimeter_name / vpc_sc_dry_run_mode	VPC-SC status.
audit_logging_enabled / artifact_registry_cmek_enabled	Audit logging and CMEK status.

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6. Configuration Pitfalls & Sensible Defaults

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

Setting	Sensible value	Risk	Consequence if wrong
APP_KEYS / JWT_SECRET / ADMIN_JWT_SECRET / API_TOKEN_SALT (auto-generated)	generated once, never changed	Critical	Rotating any of these after first deploy immediately invalidates all active sessions and API tokens; every user is logged out and all client integrations break.
database_type	POSTGRES or POSTGRES_15	Critical	Strapi requires PostgreSQL; MySQL or NONE breaks startup.
enable_nfs	true	Critical	Without shared storage, media uploads are lost on pod restart and not shared across replicas.
application_name	set once	Critical	Immutable after first deploy; changing it renames all GCP and Kubernetes resources, triggering full recreation and data loss.
application_database_name / application_database_user	set once	Critical	Immutable after first deploy; renaming causes Strapi to connect to an empty database, losing all content and users.
enable_backup_import	false unless restoring	Critical	Enabling without a valid backup_file fails the import job.
quota_memory_requests / quota_memory_limits	binary units	Critical	Bare integers are bytes and block all scheduling.
enable_cloudsql_volume	true	High	Required for PostgreSQL connectivity; blocked at plan time when disabled alongside a non-NONE database type.
memory_limit	512Mi minimum	High	Strapi is a Node.js application; too little memory causes OOM kills during admin panel operations. Raise to 1Gi or higher for production.
enable_redis	false	High	Enable only when plugins require it; enabling without a valid redis_host (and without NFS fallback) causes a startup connection error.
session_affinity	ClientIP	High	Without stickiness, the Strapi admin panel WebSocket connections drop and produce "unsaved changes" warnings.
min_instance_count	1	High	GKE does not support true scale-to-zero without KEDA; setting to 0 can leave the HPA in an inconsistent state.
enable_iap	enable for admin-facing	Medium	The Strapi admin panel is otherwise publicly reachable.
backup_retention_days	7 (raise for prod)	Medium	Too short for compliance retention.
pdb_min_available vs min_instance_count	leave headroom	Medium	1/1 can stall node upgrades (single pod cannot be evicted).
enable_topology_spread	consider for prod	Low	With multiple replicas, topology spread prevents all pods from landing in the same zone.

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

Related guides

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