Both Pod and deployment are full-fledged objects in the Kubernetes API. Deployment manages creating Pods by means of ReplicaSets. What it boils down to is that Deployment will create Pods with spec taken from the template.

In your case deployment name edgeservicepublic-svc is set to have 13 replicas. Deployment is a kind of controller in Kubernetes. Its is naturally that this controller with continuously check if 13 pods are created. When a deployment is added to the cluster, it will automatically spin up the requested number of pods, and then monitor them. If a pod dies, the deployment will automatically re-create it. Probably at first not enough pods are created co controller with pursue to achieve desried number of them.

To make sure your deployment works properly you can delete deployment, make sure that that pods are deleted. Make sure that you haven't set up autoscaler ( $ kubectl get hpa ) if so, delete it. Then if you want to change deployment specification edit deployment configuration file and apply changes ($ kubectl apply -f deployment_configuration_file.yaml).

Useful documentation about deployment , autoscaling in context of GKE.

EDIT:

Basically at first place check autoscaler then delete it if it exists. I told you to delete deployment because you told that you try to change scale amount/ number of replicas. So if you want to be 100 % sure that changes are applied is to delete whole deployment end then recreate it with desired number of replicas. Of course you can just apply changes in deployment configuration file ($ kubectl edit ...) or ( $ kubectl apply -f ) but sometimes existing pods are not deleted so it will be saver. You could also create new deployment with the same parameters but different name.