I am ops at Appuri. We deployed k8s on AWS since we are using other services like Redshift and RDS inside the VPC, also happy with how EC2 works plus of course we have Reserved instances so we didn't look into GCP yet. We're running kube on CentOS 7, we bootstrap nodes using cloud-init (user-data) to setup k8s, which we then use to run everything else. I would love to give you more details, I might write blog post about our kube setup decisions later. Kelsey wrote nice manual for setting up k8s - https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way which is definitely on my to-read list this weekend :)