Some fair points are made here, and I think running kubernetes the hard way, without a managed service, does introduce a lot of complexity. However, its not that bad when using a managed service such as EKS or GKE
Is there any significant difference between e.g. `kubeadm` and `gcloud container clusters`?
I believe when the cluster malfunctions, you're still on your own figuring that out. I had a stuck node on GKE just recently, which broke our CI. The GCE machine was there, but the node wasn't visible with kubeadm and quick SSH onto the VM hadn't discovered any immediately visible obvious issues. Auto-repair was enabled but hadn't worked - and TBH I have no idea how should I've diagnosed why it didn't (if there's even a way).
Thankfully, this was issue with the node, not master, and the CI nodes are all epheremal, so I've quickly dismissed the idea of debugging what went wrong and had just reinitialized the pool. Could've done the same with bare metal.
