Because k8s is simpler than those solutions if you're not deploying things manually through the ui. If you try to do something like infrastructure as code acro

Because k8s is simpler than those solutions if you're not deploying things manually through the ui. If you try to do something like infrastructure as code across multiple environments, with containers orchestration, service discovery, autoscaling, easy troubleshooting, authorization, easy domain name resolution, secrets at the container level then trying to do those things with App Engine becomes a horrifying ordeal. The next question is obviously do you even need those things? But basic k8s really is easy to setup. Spinning up a cluster, writing some deployments, services, and setting up an ingress takes < 6 hours (half that if you do this regularly that you have documentation on it) and is the same experience everytime - there is no, I am using GCP at home so I don't know how to do this with AWS here. The CI/CD for the git repo is also pretty much the same. Moreover, it's actually good. Sometimes you have industry standards that are just painful to use but do anyways because it's popular. With k8s, it really is a well thought out, mature solution that's better than most alternatives. Managed services often have a whole layer of bullshit e.g. last night I was looking at using App engine for a node app and I can't use the standard environment because I am using the latest version of Node that's not supported yet - and it's just one more nuisance to deal with. With k8s, it's just compute resources, containers, done. Simple.