For anyone else who is on AWS (maybe because of rds postgres, or because it's client work that needs to be on AWS), you can go outside of vanilla AWS to get a similarly great dev UX. I've used Convox + the Weave ECS AMI on a project, and it was pleasant.
What's the difference between using Kubernetes on GCP and running Kubernetes on a node on AWS EC2? By "managed" do you just mean I don't need to manage the lead node?
It's better than fully self-managing it, but GKE is still less managed than I'd personally like. I just want to submit containers as jobs to be executed in "the cloud", with the cloud provider figuring out the details of where they get executed. On GKE, have to create a cluster in the cloud, then submit your jobs to your cluster, and set up logic to manage provisioning/resizing/etc., rather than just being able to submit your jobs to a giant abstracted cluster managed by Google. Joyent's Triton container service basically does that, so it's possible.
For anyone else who is on AWS (maybe because of rds postgres, or because it's client work that needs to be on AWS), you can go outside of vanilla AWS to get a similarly great dev UX. I've used Convox + the Weave ECS AMI on a project, and it was pleasant.