Different cloud providers did different things. Google's cloud offerings started with things like GAE, a very high-level service that many people ignored because it was too alien. AWS, on the other hand, provided fairly low-level abstractions like VMs (with some aaS services sprinkled in, but distinctly still 'a thing you access over HTTP over the network'). Both offerings reflect the companies' internal engineering culture, and AWS' was much less alien and more understandable to the outside. Now every other provider basically clones AWS' paradigm, as that's where big enterprise contract money is, not in doing things well but different.

With Kubernetes we actually have something close to a high-level API for provisioning cloud workloads (it's still no GAE, as the networking and authentication problems are still these but can be solved in the long term), and the hope is that cloud providers will implement Kubernetes APIs as a first class service that allows people to truly not care about underlying compute resources. Automatically managed workloads from container images are effectively the middle ground between 'I want a linux VM' pragmatists and 'this shouldn't be this much work' idealists.

With GKE you can spin up a production HA cluster in a click [1], but you still have to think how many machines you want (there's also Autopilot, but it's expensive and I have my problems with it). AWSs' EKS is a shitshow though, it basically requires interacting with the same networking/IAM/instance boilerplate as for any AWS setup [2].

[1] - https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/creat...

[2] - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/getting-sta...