Easiest way to manage an elasticsearch cluster in GCP?

I'm trying to create my own Elasticsearch cluster to use for security analytics. I'm familiar with the function and setup of a single instance deployment, but I'm having trouble figuring out the simplest strategy to set up and manage the cluster of any sizable scale in GCP. The two ways I've played around with are:

• Building the ES cluster using Compute Engine VM's in GCP.

• Managing the cluster using the Kubernetes Engine and the official Elastic docker image.

Since I don't have much experience with containerization, I'm trying to figure out if learning and managing a kubernetes deployment would save me some headache in the long run.

We have been using elastic/helm-charts for more than a year for our product, and it is easy to manage and scale on-demand. Let me know if you need any help in deploying the helm chart.

StackExchange DevOps Q#5887, answer score: 1