dbradstock

Disclosure: I am a Googler on GKE

Google actually works a huge amount with the community to simplify Kubernetes across a number of SIGs. Its always a trade of increased flexibility and options as people use it for more workloads, versus simplicity.

Autopilot is just for GKE. You can use GKE on other clouds and also onprem (bare metal or VMs with Anthos)

View from a Googler: Autopilot stitches together existing GKE functions and is just a cluster creation decision. The layer it adds is automating the different tools together and SRE support magic so that we're monitoring it now.

El Reg's snark is what makes it fun to speak with as they do cut to the heart of it.

GKE Autopilot is still fundamentally Kubernetes and supports the k8s APIs. GKE has simplified a lot of Kubernetes tasks that can be a pain, such as upgrades & scaling, but as many people said on other threads Kubernetes definitely is not for all workloads. For workloads that actually do need to scale then Autopilot removes a lot of the time consuming tasks required to get Kubernetes running and staying running. There are restrictions so check the docs on if it would work for how you use k8s.

Disclosure: I run product for GKE at Google so I'm definitely not a neutral voice on this...