<p>I know that GKE is driven by kubernetes underneath. But I don't seem to still get is that what part is taken care by GKE and what by k8s in the layering? The main purpose of both, as it appears to me is to manage containers in a cluster. Basically, I am looking for a simpler explanation with an example. </p>

<p>GKE is a managed/hosted Kubernetes (i.e. it is managed for you so you can concentrate on running your pods/containers applications)</p>

<p>Kubernetes does handle:</p>

<ul>
<li>Running pods, scheduling them on nodes, guarantee no of replicas per Replication Controller settings (i.e. relaunch pods if they fail, relocate them if the node fails)</li>
<li>Services: proxy traffic to the right pod wherever it is located.</li>
<li>Jobs</li>
</ul>

<p>In addition, there are several 'add-ons' to Kubernetes, some of which are part of what makes GKE:</p>

<ul>
<li>DNS (you can't really live without it, even thought it's an add-on)</li>
<li>Metrics monitoring: with influxdb, grafana</li>
<li>Dashboard</li>
</ul>

<p>None of these are out-of-the-box, although they are fairly easy to setup, but you need to maintain them.
There is no real 'logging' add-on, but there are various projects to do this (using Logspout, logstash, elasticsearch etc...)</p>

<p>In short Kubernetes does the orchestration, the rest are services that would run on top of Kubernetes.</p>

<p>GKE brings you all these components out-of-the-box, and you don't have to maintain them. They're setup for you, and they're more 'integrated' with the Google portal. </p>

<p>One important thing that everyone needs is the LoadBalancer part:
- Since Pods are ephemeral containers, that can be rescheduled anywhere and at any time, they are not static, so ingress traffic needs to be managed separately.</p>

<p>This can be done within Kubernetes by using a DaemonSet to fix a Pod on a specific node, and use a <code>hostPort</code> for that Pod to bind to the node's IP. 
Obviously this lacks fault tolerance, so you could use multiple and do DNS round robin load balancing. </p>

<p>GKE takes care of all this too with external Load Balancing. 
(On AWS, it's similar, with ALB taking care of load balancing in Kubernetes)</p>
