While the software development ecosystem is converging on Kubernetes as the orchestration platform for containers, running Kubernetes clusters remains operationally complex. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is a managed Kubernetes solution for deploying containerized applications that alleviates the operational overhead of running and maintaining Kubernetes clusters. Our teams have had a good experience using GKE, with the platform doing the heavy lifting of applying security patches, monitoring and auto-repairing the nodes, and managing multicluster and multiregion networking. In our experience, Google's API-first approach in exposing platform capabilities, as well as using industry standards such as OAuth for service authorisation, improve the developer experience. It's important to consider that GKE is under rapid development with many of its APIs in beta release which, despite the developers' best efforts to abstract consumers from underlying changes, can impact you. We're expecting continuous improvement around maturity of infrastructure as code with Terraform on GKE and similar tools.

While the software development ecosystem is converging on Kubernetes as the orchestration platform for containers, running Kubernetes clusters remains operationally complex. GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) is a managed Kubernetes solution for deploying containerized applications that alleviates the operational overhead of running and maintaining Kubernetes clusters. Our teams have had a good experience using GKE, with the platform doing the heavy lifting of applying security patches, monitoring and auto-repairing the nodes, and managing multicluster and multiregion networking. In our experience, Google's API-first approach in exposing platform capabilities, as well as using industry standards such as OAuth for service authorization, improve the developer experience. It's important to consider that GKE is under rapid development which, despite the developers' best efforts to abstract consumers from underlying changes, has impacted us temporarily in the past. We're expecting continuous improvement around maturity of Infrastructure as code with Terraform on GKE and similar tools.