I had some trouble understanding the documentation regarding upgrading versions for GKE clusters and nodes. https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/cluster-upgrades#cluster_upgrades
Why does a cluster need its own version?
Why does a cluster need its own version?
Technically "cluster version" is a control plane components version.
Because K8s doesn't require you to have the same version of K8s on nodes and masters, it has 2 separate "updates" - update a version of control plane components and update a version of nodes (per node group).