Tolgee on GKE Autopilot

Tolgee is an open-source, developer-friendly localization (i18n) and translation management platform built on Spring Boot. This module deploys Tolgee 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 Tolgee 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.

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What Tolgee costs on RAD, and how that compares

Tolgee on RAD's GKE Autopilot module costs about US$149.81 a month in a Google Cloud project you own, with a one-time 175-credit module fee (US$17.50, or 157.5 credits in a RAD-managed project, 10% lower). This is the lower-cost of the two ways to run Tolgee on RAD — the Cloud Run module runs the same platform for about US$180.87 a month, kept always-on, for the same module fee. GKE Autopilot pods handle continuous availability more cheaply than an always-on Cloud Run instance. If you only need Tolgee occasionally — a translation push ahead of a release, an evaluation before adopting it — 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	175 credits (US$17.50 at the top-up price)	157.5 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$149.81 a month for the default configuration (table below)	Metered hourly in credits; RAD publishes 111 credits a day, about 3,330 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, 2x vCPU / 4 GiB	US$79.35
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$149.81

How it compares

• Tolgee's own hosted plan, Tolgee Cloud, starts with a free tier (30,000 words, 3 seats), then Translate at €58/month (about US$63), Optimise at €133/month (about US$144), and Manage at €373/month (about US$403), all billed annually (source: tolgee.io/pricing). RAD's own-project figure sits between Tolgee Cloud's Translate and Optimise tiers, but it buys a dedicated instance with its own database and file server rather than a shared, seat-limited one.
• 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 — all cheaper in cash terms, but running an always-reachable i18n platform with its own database, file server and shared cluster overhead yourself means patching, backups and TLS by hand.
• Tolgee's continuous-availability default is what makes this guide's running cost higher than many other modules on RAD — translation workflows are typically checked throughout the working day rather than opened occasionally, so it is configured not to scale down.

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

If Tolgee 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 translation keys and history 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 Tolgee outright and redeploy it later. A redeploy costs the module fee again, plus the builds — roughly 180 credits (about US$18) in your own project, or 162.5 credits in a RAD-managed one.

Deleting saves money only once Tolgee 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$4.99 a day), that works out to about 4 days or more, or about 2 days or more in a RAD-managed one (111 credits a day). Most of the running cost here is the GKE pod, the database and the NFS file server; they stop only when nothing else in the project uses them, so deleting Tolgee 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; tolgee.io/pricing for Tolgee Cloud's hosted plans.

1. Overview

Tolgee runs as a Java / Spring Boot web workload. The deployment wires together a focused set of Google Cloud services:

Capability	Google Cloud service	Notes
Compute	GKE Autopilot	Spring Boot pods, 2 vCPU / 4 GiB by default, horizontally autoscaled
Database	Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL 15	Required — Tolgee does not support MySQL or other engines
Object storage	Cloud Storage	A bucket for optional file storage (screenshots/imports)
Secrets	Secret Manager	Auto-generated initial admin password and JWT signing secret; database password
Ingress	Cloud Load Balancing	External LoadBalancer, optional custom domain + managed certificate

Sensible defaults worth knowing up front:

• PostgreSQL 15 is mandatory. The database engine is fixed by the shared application layer; selecting any other engine breaks startup.
• Tolgee connects to Cloud SQL over TCP via the Auth Proxy loopback. Its bundled PostgreSQL JDBC driver cannot use a Unix socket, so on GKE the entrypoint connects to the Cloud SQL Auth Proxy sidecar on 127.0.0.1 (plain TCP, no SSL — the proxy terminates TLS). enable_cloudsql_volume therefore defaults to true.
• The JWT secret is generated automatically and stored in Secret Manager. It must never be rotated after first boot without a maintenance window — rotating it immediately invalidates all active user sessions.
• SERVER_PORT, not PORT. Tolgee reads SERVER_PORT = 8080; the module sets it explicitly on the container.
• Session affinity is ClientIP by default so UI sessions from the same client return to the same pod.
• No Redis. Tolgee stores all translation state in PostgreSQL; enable_redis defaults to false.
• Minimum 1 replica is maintained (GKE does not support scale-to-zero); max_instance_count defaults to 5, but keep it at 1 for a stateful single-writer deployment unless you have validated concurrent-writer safety.
• Schema is created by Liquibase on first boot — no separate migration job.

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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 Tolgee workload

Tolgee 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 Tolgee 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

Tolgee stores all application data (projects, languages, keys, translations, users) in a managed Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL 15 instance. Pods reach it through the Cloud SQL Auth Proxy sidecar on 127.0.0.1 over TCP (Tolgee's JDBC driver cannot use a Unix socket); no public IP is exposed. On first deploy the foundation's create-db-and-user.sh step creates the database and role, and Tolgee runs its own Liquibase migrations on boot.

• 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> --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. For the connection model, automated backups, and password rotation, see App_GKE.

C. Cloud Storage

A Cloud Storage bucket (name_suffix = "storage") is provisioned for optional file storage — Tolgee keeps translations in PostgreSQL, so this bucket holds only uploaded screenshots or import artifacts if you mount it via gcs_volumes or configure Tolgee's S3-compatible file storage. The workload service account is granted access.

• Console: Cloud Storage → Buckets.
• CLI:

  gcloud storage buckets list --project "$PROJECT"
  gcloud storage ls gs://<bucket>/            # bucket name is in the Outputs

See App_GKE for CMEK options and GCS Fuse mounts.

D. Secret Manager

Two secrets are generated automatically and stored in Secret Manager: the initial admin password (TOLGEE_AUTHENTICATION_INITIAL_PASSWORD) used to log in for the first time, and the JWT signing secret (TOLGEE_AUTHENTICATION_JWT_SECRET) used to sign all user session tokens. The database password is managed separately by the foundation. On GKE the Common layer also exposes the raw secret values so the workload can bypass Secret Manager read-after-write consistency (the Keycloak/Directus pattern).

• Console: Security → Secret Manager.
• CLI:

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

See App_GKE for the Secret Store CSI integration and rotation.

E. 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 reserve_static_ip defaults to true — this is a required default, not an optional nicety: App_GKE computes the GKE_SERVICE_URL injected into the container from the reserved static IP, but falls back to the unreachable cluster-internal *.svc.cluster.local hostname when no static IP is reserved and the ephemeral LoadBalancer IP isn't yet known at the moment Terraform renders the Deployment's env vars. Tolgee is one of the modules fixed by this default during the fleet-wide GKE verification campaign (see Configuration Variables → Group 19).

• 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.

F. Cloud Logging & Monitoring

Pod stdout/stderr flow to Cloud Logging; GKE and Cloud SQL metrics flow to Cloud Monitoring. Optional uptime checks (against /actuator/health) 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. Tolgee Application Behaviour

• First-deploy database setup. No dedicated init job runs — the App_GKE foundation's create-db-and-user.sh step creates the PostgreSQL role and database and grants schema ownership. Tolgee then creates and migrates its entire schema with Liquibase automatically on first boot.
• Migrations on start. Tolgee applies its Liquibase changesets on every startup, so upgrading the application_version applies schema changes without a separate step.
• The JWT secret is immutable after first boot. It is generated once and written to Secret Manager and kept stable across restarts and replicas. Rotating TOLGEE_AUTHENTICATION_JWT_SECRET immediately invalidates all active user sessions — only rotate during a planned maintenance window.
• First-run login. After deploy, sign in as the initial owner: TOLGEE_AUTHENTICATION_INITIAL_USERNAME (default admin@techequity.cloud) with the generated password from Secret Manager. Change the password and configure additional auth providers (Google/OAuth2/SSO) from the Tolgee UI before going live.
• Health path. The readiness/startup/liveness probes target /actuator/health, which returns an unauthenticated 200 only after Liquibase migrations complete. Allow several minutes on first boot (60-second initial delay plus a wide failure window) — Spring Boot + first-run migrations start more slowly than a typical Node app.
• Single-writer by design. Tolgee has no queue/coordination layer; scaling beyond one pod runs concurrent writers against the same database and NFS attachment volume. Keep a single replica unless you have validated concurrent-writer safety for your workload.
• Inspect the DB wiring injected into the running pod:

  kubectl exec -n "$NAMESPACE" deploy/<service-name> -- env | grep -E 'SPRING_DATASOURCE|SERVER_PORT'

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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 Tolgee are listed; every other input is inherited from App_GKE with its standard behaviour and defaults.

Group 3 — Application Identity

Variable	Default	Description
application_name	tolgee	Base name for resources. Do not change after first deploy.
application_version	latest	Tolgee image tag used as FROM tolgee/tolgee:<tag> for the thin custom wrapper build. Pin to a release (e.g. v3.130.4) in production.

Group 4 — Runtime & Scaling

Variable	Default	Description
deploy_application	true	Set false to provision infrastructure only.
container_resources	cpu_limit=2000m, memory_limit=4Gi	Tolgee requires at least 2 GiB memory for reliable operation.
min_instance_count	1	Minimum replicas; GKE requires ≥ 1 (no scale-to-zero).
max_instance_count	5	Maximum replicas. Keep at 1 unless concurrent-writer safety is validated.
container_port	8080	Tolgee's Spring Boot SERVER_PORT.
enable_cloudsql_volume	true	Cloud SQL Auth Proxy sidecar — required; Tolgee connects to the proxy on 127.0.0.1 over TCP.

Group 6 — GKE Backend & Cluster

Variable	Default	Description
service_type	LoadBalancer	How the Kubernetes Service is exposed.
session_affinity	ClientIP	Sticky routing so UI sessions return to the same pod.

Group 7 — StatefulSet

Variable	Default	Description
stateful_pvc_enabled	null (Deployment)	Tolgee stores all state in PostgreSQL/NFS, so a StatefulSet with per-pod PVCs is not needed.

Group 13 — Filesystem (NFS)

Variable	Default	Description
enable_nfs	true	Provisions Cloud Filestore NFS for optional Tolgee attachment storage.
gcs_volumes	[]	GCS Fuse volume mounts for the optional file-storage bucket.

Group 15 — Redis Cache & Queue

Variable	Default	Description
enable_redis	false	Leave off — Tolgee stores all state in PostgreSQL and does not require Redis.

Group 16 — Database Backend

Variable	Default	Description
application_database_name	tolgee	PostgreSQL database name. Immutable after first deploy.
application_database_user	tolgee	Application database user. Immutable after first deploy.

Group 19 — Custom Domain, Static IP & Networking

Variable	Default	Description
enable_custom_domain	true	Provisions a Kubernetes Ingress with a Google-managed certificate for custom hostnames.
application_domains	[]	Hostnames served by the Ingress.
reserve_static_ip	true	Load-bearing default, not merely "can be reserved." App_GKE computes the injected GKE_SERVICE_URL (and any self-referencing URL Tolgee bakes into config at boot) from the reserved static IP; with reserve_static_ip = false, Terraform falls back to the cluster-internal *.svc.cluster.local hostname if the ephemeral LoadBalancer IP isn't yet known when the Deployment's env vars render — a real, reproducible race, not a theoretical edge case. Tolgee is one of the modules fixed by flipping this to true during the fleet-wide GKE verification campaign; leaving it false risks the service pointing at an address unreachable from outside the cluster.
static_ip_name	""	Name for the reserved static IP. Leave empty to auto-generate.
network_tags	["nfsserver"]	Node/pod network tags; nfsserver is required when enable_nfs = true.
gateway_backend_stage	"dev"	Cloud Deploy stage whose Service the Gateway HTTPRoute targets (ignored when enable_cloud_deploy = false).

All other inputs follow standard App_GKE behaviour.

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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.
stage_service_cluster_ips	Map of ClusterIPs for stage-specific services.
service_external_ip	External LoadBalancer IP (when a static IP is reserved).
service_url	URL to reach Tolgee.
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).
github_repository_url / github_repository_owner / github_repository_name	CI/CD GitHub details.
artifact_registry_repository / cloudbuild_trigger_name / cloudbuild_trigger_id	Registry and build trigger.
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).

Inherited plan-time validation. This module passes its configuration through the App_GKE foundation engine, which validates values and combinations at plan time — an out-of-range redis_port/backup_retention_days, IAP with no authorized identities, a gen1 runtime with NFS/GCS mounts, a database_type that does not match an enabled extension, ResourceQuota memory without a binary unit suffix. Invalid configuration fails the plan with a clear, named error before any resource is created, so most mistakes below are caught up front rather than at apply or runtime.

Setting	Sensible value	Risk	Consequence if wrong
TOLGEE_AUTHENTICATION_JWT_SECRET (auto-generated)	Only rotate in a maintenance window	Critical	Rotating it invalidates all active user sessions, forcing immediate re-login for everyone.
application_database_name / application_database_user	Set once	Critical	Immutable after first deploy; renaming recreates the DB/user and destroys all data.
enable_cloudsql_volume	true	Critical	The Auth Proxy sidecar is required for Tolgee's TCP JDBC connection; disabling it removes the 127.0.0.1 endpoint and breaks the database connection.
container_resources.memory_limit	4Gi (≥ 2 GiB)	High	Below ~2 GiB the Spring Boot JVM OOMs during first-boot Liquibase migrations.
max_instance_count	1 unless validated	High	Tolgee has no coordination layer; multiple concurrent writers against one DB/NFS volume can conflict.
session_affinity	ClientIP	High	Without stickiness, UI sessions bounce between pods and users are logged out unexpectedly.
min_instance_count	1	High	GKE requires min ≥ 1; the validation guard rejects 0.
quota_memory_requests / _limits	binary units (4Gi, 8192Mi)	Critical	Bare integers are bytes and block all pod scheduling in the namespace.
application_version	Pin in production	High	latest can pull a new major with incompatible migrations on redeploy.
startup_probe (/actuator/health)	Keep the wide first-boot window	Medium	Too tight a window fails the pod while Liquibase migrations are still running on a fresh DB.
enable_redis	false	Medium	Redis is unused; enabling it adds cost without benefit.

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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. Tolgee-specific application configuration shared with the Cloud Run variant is described in Tolgee_Common.

Related guides

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