Google Kubernetes Engine

GKE is the best managed Kubernetes solution out there, it is very well suited to deploy all kinds of application loads for Dev or Production. If you need to migrate your current workload from a monolithic infrastructure or VMs towards a container solution GKE is the go-to for the best results in terms of stability and feature-rich. If you are looking to take full advantage of IPv6 then GKE might not meet your expectations. Container-native load balancers do not support internal TCP/UDP load balancers or network load balancers, functionality of container-native load balancing is currently limited to the HTTP(S) /L7 load balancers only.

Google Kubernetes Engine is well suited for dynamic and large workloads since it can scale up with usage. It is easily configurable, which allows for flexibility.
User interface is simple to navigate, which reduces roadblocks for a team with people unfamiliar with Kubernetes.
Great if you are already using other GCP services as it integrates well with that.

The Google Kubernetes Engine clusters are very good at being a managed cloud K8s platform - lots of documentation, features, and updates are available. It's also newbie-friendly - for both administrators and developers. Unfortunately, currently, it cannot reach true zero scale - thus, costs (rent for the service) are still involved even if you are barely using it.

Thankfully, it's possible to have alternatives in Google Cloud:

• Your own K8s cluster on Compute Engine VMs - you manage it completely; it will have access to a lot of Google Cloud services.
• Cloud Run cluster - less documented but more flexible
• Anthos clusters - you can use this service for a lot of types of K8s clusters - Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, on-prem, AWS, Azure

GKE compared to Azure is a lot easier to quickly bootstrap a project for demo purposes. GKE has much better integration with the Kubernetes open-source project and GKE is the first provider to adopt the newest features and it looks like many of the features on the Kubernetes are well suited for GCP purposes.

At the moment, the best-managed cluster on the market. Quick deployment with quite specific project requirements. The mesh ingress (istio) allowed the building of a quite complicated upgrade process for applications.

Google Kubernetes Engine increases productivity and helps teams focus on their core product without worrying about where to run it. If your application is very small and simple, a serverless option could be better.

Google Kubernetes Engine is a natural addition for users/organizations already using the Google Cloud Platform. For us, it was a simple addition and was up and running within minutes. Our challenge has been that the public documentation for applications that use Kubernetes is aimed at Amazon Web Services, so it requires extra research and work to get running on Google Kubernetes.