tilt

Full-disclosure: I co-founded a company that's building a developer tool for K8s (and distributed systems in general). But we've had a lot of success with running on GKE. The tool that we're making takes away the complexity of building, testing and deploying the stack, and GKE takes care of running it. In fact we use GKE for both our development and staging/prod environments. There are a lot of great tools out there that vastly improve the K8s developer experience[1] and the cloud providers take away of the pain of operating it. And with tools like Terraform and Pulumi you can codify the whole setup. Here's an example of how you can quite easily get started on GKE: https://medium.com/garden-io/gke-and-cloud-sql-a-complete-wo... Here's a video of the same workflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHyeD97GrE4. [1] https://github.com/GoogleC

There are some nice open-source projects out there for getting started with distributed systems (full disclosure, I'm a co-founder of one of them). They all abstract away (what some may call) the boring bits of getting started with distributed systems, like plumbing and such, and in general aim to improve the overall developer experience. In no particular order: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/skaffold https://github.com/garden-io/garden https://github.com/windmilleng/tilt

"Tilt replaces `docker build && kubectl apply` or `docker-compose`. It watches your files, updates automatically, and gives you a UI that shows you error so you don't have to spelunk with kubectl." => that is very clear, consider merging https://github.com/windmilleng/tilt/pull/930 to add it to your readme