I hear this refrain consistently on HN but of the options I've tried, GKE is the most pleasant for my single person app.

- App Engine has a bunch of weird limitations and slow deploy times. Qualitatively, it feels like the spotlight has moved on.

- Running my own compute instances felt like reinventing Kubernetes, especially once you roll your own deploy mechanism and throw load balancing in the mix. I also don't buy that it's easier.

- Cloud run is promising but for database heavy apps it's a non-starter.

- GKE was pretty smooth. It feels like it gets a lot more love than App Engine. The UI was functional with lots of depth. Once I push a docker image, GKE updates the nodes to serve the latest version. Load balancing was a matter of ~3 yaml files at 10 lines a pop.