Ask HN: New startup, which cloud provider to commit to for Kubernetes?

Hi HN,

I'm a technical co-founder at a healthcare startup working towards setting up infra for our ASP.NET Core application. I'm comfortable with Docker and have recently started learning and using Kubernetes to deploy the app and various services. So far it's been a great experience that simplifies a lot of setup and management I had to do manually in the past.

The issue I'm running into now is deciding which cloud provider to go with to deploy and maintain the Kubernetes cluster. I've tried several different deployments and providers and still have trouble deciding which one to commit to. I was hoping to get some feedback from those of you who have experience deploying, running, and maintaining applications on top of a k8s cluster and have formed some preferences and opinions around some providers and tools. Any guidance greatly appreciated!

Have tried:

* Tectonic on Azure using Terraform

* Google Container Engine for Kubernetes (GKE)

* Azure Container Service for Kubernetes

Did not try:

* AWS

* Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Rough notes:

* Tectonic requires a license. The integration into Azure is also not as first-class as I would've liked—took me a while to figure out the proper provisioner setup for a custom StorageClass resource I had to create so that PersistentVolumeClaims would properly provision an Azure Managed Disk.

* GKE on Google Cloud Platform feels like the most first-class integration of a Kubernetes cluster into its host cloud platform. The new dashboard built into GKE is consistent with the rest of the console's design system and still exposes valuable information about Kubernetes resources. A StorageClass was already provisioned with no additional setup necessary.

* GCP HIPAA BAA feels less mature than Azure's. Also lacks managed SQL Server db solution.

* Azure Container Service config is too opaque—no k8s version flexibility, unclear roadmap around sync with upstream updates