We are looking for a solid, declarative (yaml), based proceedure to automate the setup of our Kubernetes cluster and application deployments on Google Container Engine.
As our last resort in a serious failure we want to be able to:
What are the solutions people are currently using. Doing this manually takes us about an hour and is error prone. Really it could take 15-20 mins if automated.
You should take a look at Google Cloud Deployment Manager. It "automates the creation and management of your Google Cloud Platform resources for you" meaning that it can create a Google Container Engine cluster as well as create your deployments.
Looking through the GKE deployment manager example should help get you started.