this is just a question about this two awesome product from google cloud platform.
i believe that google kubernetes engine is running on google compute engine,so what is the real advantage of using google kubernetes engine in term of server management?
what i mean here only refer to updating OS and patching the security just like Google App Engine handled for us. does the SRE handle the updating and security patching?
i know that google app engine already do this for us (updating OS etc2).. but on GAE, we are not able to attach persistent disk..
my plan is to host a flat file CMS, which in this case, no need for cloud sql, cloud datastore and etc.. and cloud memorystore is way too expensive
a big difference between the two is that a normal GCE VM instance is completely unmanaged. Once you've used the GCP provided image, all updates are up to you. Whereas with GKE, the Master and node versions can be set to upgrade automatically and you only choose which OS you want, not the specific OS version.
This means that if there are security patches or updates to a node OS, it will get pushed to your cluster. When there are improvements or patches to GKE (as long as you enable automatic upgrades) your nodes will receive the new versions.
GKE may cost you a little more than a stand alone GCE VM, but it comes with more automation and management baked in.