We use GKE but there's nothing stopping most organisations to do the same.

It doesn't bear much weight though, and I've had experience with other toolings largely to the same effect.

I agree with the sibling comment about upgrades - this is IMO where GKE really shines as a cluster upgrade is mostly a button-pressing exercise.

Not OP, but similar workloads, team of 5 We use kops to deplot and manage the clusters. The hardest part is updating, due to the workloads running on it. Other than that, little to no problems with kube itself.