#gcp (2021-05)

my feeling is that gke is an overkill for a small/mid level startup, but wanted to validate that i’m not missing something here

It depends on what you mean by saying overkill. I haven’t worked with App Engine yet, however if your concerns are about management overhead, there is a brand new GKE Autopilot: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/cloudblog.withgoogle.com/products/containers-kubernetes/introducing-gke-autopilot/amp/

one thing to take into consideration that something like AppEngine (which IS cool tech) is going to have a much smaller userbase than something like Kubernetes, so you’re going to have less opensource/thirdparty things available to leverage that are built for app engine than kubernetes. you’re also going to be able to lean on community support a lot less.

often platforms that are touted as “easier to use” end up requiring more in depth understanding because you need to account for their specific quirks.

if you’re on GCP i’d say that GKE is probably the lowest management overhead offering out of the clouds’ kubernetes offerings- but yeh nothing is free (from an ops investment perspective)

my main concern is that if something breaks, or if an upgrade is needed - a pretty high expertise is required to handle that(without throwing money in the way)

like - k8s is not fool proof

question is if app engine is a bit more fool proof and can just “execute my container and return a load balanced url”

Depending on your requirements you may want to use CloudRun, it’s the easiest

app engine is pretty mature .. it is expensive than k8s. over the past 8 years, i never had any complaints