We are well into the reeds of what doesn’t matter, only in that fly has given us a very under the covers look at their implementation that is hard to find with other alternatives. But as someone who has run K8s in other contexts I find the following to be pretty circumspect (not in a way that causes me concern, I’m a happy gke user)
> GKE Autopilot manages the entire underlying infrastructure of clusters, including the control plane, nodes, and all system components. If you use GKE Standard mode, GKE manages the control plane and system components, and you manage the nodes.
There is a mile of implementation detail in that. Which I’m happy for them to keep on their side of the street.