Still getting 504 errors in GKE even when everything looks fine? We faced the same issue. Pods were healthy, APIs were responding, and there were no errors in logs. The real problem wasn’t the application. It was a 30-second timeout. We spent hours debugging this. Everything looked normal: Pods were running fine APIs were responding No crashes or error logs But still, requests kept failing. We were seeing random 503 and 504 errors. The Confusing Part Short requests worked perfectly Logs showed no issues System appeared healthy But anything taking more than around 30 seconds failed every time. What We Thought Initially At first, we assumed: Application bug Database latency Resource limits We checked everything. Nothing was wrong. The Real Cause After digging deeper, we found the actual issue: GKE Load Balancer has a default timeout of 30 seconds. This means: Your backend may still be processing But the load balancer stops waiting Result: 504 Gateway Timeout.…