| Full-disclosure: I co-founded a company that's building a developer tool for K8s (and distributed systems in general). But we've had a lot of success with running on GKE. The tool that we're making takes away the complexity of building, testing and deploying the stack, and GKE takes care of running it. In fact we use GKE for both our development and staging/prod environments. There are a lot of great tools out there that vastly improve the K8s developer experience[1] and the cloud providers take away of the pain of operating it. And with tools like Terraform and Pulumi you can codify the whole setup. Here's an example of how you can quite easily get started on GKE: https://medium.com/garden-io/gke-and-cloud-sql-a-complete-wo... Here's a video of the same workflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHyeD97GrE4. [1] https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/skaffold https://github.com/garden-io/garden https://github.com/windmilleng/tilt |