GKE Autopilot is a mode of operation in GKE where Google manages the underlying infrastructure, including nodes, node pools, and their upgrades. This significantly reduces the management and operational overhead for the user, allowing teams to focus solely on deploying and managing their containerized applications. Since the applications are not exposed publicly, the zonal or regional nature of the cluster primarily impacts availability within Google Cloud, and Autopilot is available for both. Autopilot minimizes the operational burden, which is a key requirement.

Option A: A Standard zonal GKE cluster requires you to manage the nodes yourself, including sizing, scaling, and upgrades, increasing operational overhead compared to Autopilot.

Option B: Manually installing and managing Kubernetes on a fleet of Compute Engine instances involves the highest level of management overhead, which contradicts the requirement to minimize it.

Option D: A Standard regional GKE cluster provides higher availability than a zonal cluster by replicating the control plane and nodes across multiple zones within a region. However, it still requires you to manage the underlying nodes, unlike Autopilot.

Reference to Google Cloud Certified - Associate Cloud Engineer Documents:

The different modes of GKE operation, including Standard and Autopilot, and their respective management responsibilities and benefits, are clearly outlined in the Google Kubernetes Engine documentation, a core topic for the Associate Cloud Engineer certification. The emphasis on reduced operational overhead with Autopilot is a key differentiator.