Spanner, a Google-managed relational database service, has been the gold standard for powering globally-distributed and/or horizontally-scalable relational apps. However, users interested in adopting Spanner have to weigh the benefits of a fully-managed service with the proprietary and expensive nature of the service. YugabyteDB, an open-source geo-distributed SQL database inspired by Google Spanner's architecture, offers a cost-effective alternative that can be deployed on any cloud platform, including managed services like Google Cloud Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Deploying YugabyteDB on GKE strikes a balance between managing infrastructure and using an open cloud-native SQL database. While multi-region deployments of YugabyteDB require additional considerations due to Kubernetes' underlying architecture, a global DNS service can be used to connect multiple GKE clusters, making it easy to run a globally-consistent YugabyteDB cluster across different regions.