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Comment by leonardteo | Hacker News Reader

Actually K8S itself as a standard is not complex/hard. If you are a developer and user/consumer of K8S, use it! If the cluster is managed by someone else, K8S is great.

It only gets complex when you have to provision & manage your own clusters. That's where Rancher really shines, as it makes it so much simpler to deploy and manage K8s everywhere.

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I place provisioning and management of your own clusters in a category I call "installability" or "deployability." It's a fundamental category of UX especially for technical and infrastructure applications.

I once tried to deploy a minimal test instance of OpenStack. Granted this was years ago, but I have been doing Linux since 1993 and I could not get it to run. That's an example of absolutely horrible UX at the deployability level.

K8S is nowhere near that bad but it definitely seems much harder than it needs to be to provision a basic default configuration for a working cluster.

K8S is a lot easier than OpenStack to install, but when comparing something like Rancher to OpenStack, it should be compared to something like OpenStack Ansible, or a vendor version of OpenStack (RIP HPE Helion) which were a lot easier than apt-get install openstack is.

K8S has a lot less moving parts - a couple of binaries / containers and etcd. The issue start coming up when you go beyond the single control plane node, and want a HA API.

Why not compare it to a instead to a contemporary competitor - Nomad - which has simplicity as a core value? It has _far_ fewer moving parts than Kubernetes.

I was talking about the GP comparing their OpenStack install experience to something like Rancher, which is not an apples to apples comparison.

- on a side note - OpenStack and Kubernetes are not competitors, they are quite complementary collections of applications, that both have their place in a modern open source infrastructure.

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