Exploring different ways of running Kubernetes on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

The Lay of the Land

Upon reading the Kubernetes documentation, you will observe that there are three fundamentally different ways of running Kubernetes on GCP.

• _Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)__: _Secured and managed (by Google) Kubernetes service
• Running Kubernetes on Google Compute Engine_: _Open-source turnkey solution
• Bootstrapping clusters with kubeadm_: _No-frills Kubernetes cluster

Please note: There are other solutions that are outside of the scope of this article; RedHat OpenShift comes to mind.

Broadly speaking, the trade-off when selecting a choice is between simplicity and flexibility. Interestingly, cost is not a significant factor as running your own high-availability control plane on GCE is comparable to the cost of GKE that provides it for you.

#gke #google-cloud-platform #kubernetes