[wyaeld]

easiest way is just start experimenting with GKE on google cloud, and see if it has value to you. Don't bother trying to deploy and manage it before you've kicked the tires.

Out of the box its quite good, depending on what you are doing, once you have cert-manager issuing you free certs, linkerd managing a service mesh, and stackdriver giving you an entire ops stack, its a bit hard to go back

[williamallthing]

Thanks for the Linkerd shoutout! For those who aren't familiar with the project, Linkerd will give you per-service metrics (success rates, RPS, latency distributions), mutual TLS, load balancing, and a bunch of other cool stuff, on almost any Kubernetes app, right out of the box. No config necessary.

[collyw]

Is there a way to do this without spedning a fortune on Google cloud costs?

[protomikron]

How big is the vendor-lockin though? Let's say I want to use both Hetzner Cloud and GCP instances - I am sure it's possible, but the question is how much of a hassle it is ...

[bonesss]

That depends on your app portfolio (naturally), how impacted it is by k8s version changes, and how much cloud specialization it requires.

You're probably better off on k8s than just about anything you didn't write yourself wrt to vendor lock-in. The true lock-in, IME, are when you use cloud features that aren't portable. Humble apps are fine, but ambitious apps are bound to those ambitious capabilities.

Seen next to comparable parallel installations it's a pretty minimal of per-environment specialization, and you can generally tweak the environments to support transparent parallel deployments. It's the differences in how load balancers work and which resources are immediately available that create work since the abstraction layer may not fully abstract away the environments.

[tjpnz]

Most of the issues I've faced (Ingress cough) have been solved by reading through the relevant pages in the Kubernetes documentation. A lot of the docs/tutorials provided by GCP link back there.

[mjlee]

If you want to use both then you should investigate rancher - that's the problem they're trying to solve.