Google Just Moved the Control Plane Boundary

For a decade, the Kubernetes scaling playbook had one move: add another cluster. Need more capacity? Add a cluster. Need workload isolation? Add a cluster. Need regional separation? Add a cluster. Need a dedicated GPU pool? Add a cluster. The cluster became the unit of scale because the control plane could not scale far enough to avoid making it one. At Google Cloud Next '26, Google made the opposite bet. A single Kubernetes-conformant control plane spanning 256,000 nodes across multiple regions