Google Kubernetes Engine vs. IBM Cloud Managed Istio

Google Kubernetes Engine is well suited for dynamic and large workloads since it can scale up with usage. It is easily configurable, which allows for flexibility. User interface is simple to navigate, which reduces roadblocks for a team with people unfamiliar with Kubernetes. Great if you are already using other GCP services as it integrates well with that.

Incentivized

It is a perfect application when you have multiple users and/or developers and you want to create rules and standards for access and the ability to change access levels. The reporting of usage is good, but adding more granularity into the metrics that have been used to measure are not specific enough. They provide detail but drilling into the detail would be more appropriate i.e. access to the baseline data.

Incentivized

• Deployment of a new GKE cluster is really fast in comparison to other cloud providers.
• GCP is ahead other vendors and always provide the most up to date Kubernetes version.
• GKE automation for master upgrade and the worker nodes pool works really well.

Incentivized

• Debug issues
• Monitoring
• allows many services form many different sources

• Not as intuitive as it could be
• Documentation could be better, especially for people using other Google Cloud tools
• Not the preferred Kubernetes Engine for many apps

Incentivized

• Still missing functionalities for a full usage as traffic director.

Incentivized

It's a great product if you learn it. It has flexibility and is very strong. Autoscaling and Resource management make running huge applications a breeze. Using Helm with Kubernetes and Terraform for infrastructure creation can totally automate your CICD pipeline. You also get easy access to CUDA cores for machine learning.

Incentivized

Google support is excellent and helpful, but the first answer is always so bureaucratic no matter how many logs, evidence, and information you sent.

Incentivized

Training and usage support available

Incentivized

We had to move several products to Google Cloud, and the Google Kubernetes Engine was the option recommended to us, so we investigated it and ran with it. Back then (2019), we were not aware of Cloud Run-provisioned K8s clusters, so our other option was a completely self-managed K8s cluster on Compute Engine VMs, which we did not have the knowledge of and capacity to handle.

Incentivized

1) One-stop solution for all the complex network connectivity managed by [IBM Cloud Managed Istio]. 2) Nice dashboard to understand the flow. 3) Easy to troubleshoot the service if any one of the APIs is not responding. 4) We can integrate it with Azure Kubernetes service and other cloud provider Kubernetes services. 5) Monitoring the health of the pods can be easily configured and alerts can be triggered very accurately with this tool.

Incentivized

• Compared to other big K8s providers it has the best price/performance factors.
• Upgrade process from stable to regular versions
• Old stable releases: 1.15/1.16 should be in a stable branch.

Incentivized

• Management burden is reduced resulting in positive ROI.
• Application is being seamlessly instrumented with good impact on business.

Incentivized