tl;dr if you're a team of developers sitting around a table shouting at your monitor because K8s isn't working, hire someone to do the job right for you. I think you'll find it's pretty easy and utterly worth every penny invested in it.

> Edit: this does not mean k8s is bad, but rather that we are probably not the right use case for it!

Or it could mean you're not the right people for it?

Do you have a dedicated individual or team that represents infrastructure engineering? Are you a team of developers trying to play the Ops game? More often than not people/companies that struggle to get K8s going or use it are a team of developers who's expertise is code and not infrastructure/automation.

K8s is hard when done from scratch (there's a book and a video course about that by THE K8s guy.) It's not hard when you use Kops, Tectonic (discontinued, I believe), EKS, or one of the other managed services. Implementing a YAML file and launching it isn't hard. Also, you don't have to understand it inside out; you only have to understand how-to use it. Can you tell me how every component in your microwave works or do you just get on with cooking your food?

And to say you're not the use case for it - that's highly unlikely. I mean, it's possible, but it's unlikely. Your work loads and software solutions would have to be highly unique and or specialised because hey, it's not like Google's setup is simple, right?