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Comment by ninkendo | Hacker News Reader

Yeah most of the (IMO) legitimate complaints about the difficulty of k8s are about how hard it is to correctly set up and administer. (Networking setup, making ingress work, cloud service integration, etc.) Especially when you get into permissions/namespaces and trying to get that right for a decent size organization and trying to configure things for least privilege. Simply using it isn’t that hard IMO.

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Right but this is the irony I think.

If you need the scale provided by k8s, you are probably in a large org. If you are in a large org, you are probably intermediated from running k8s directly by some kind of devops/cloudops team who needs to sort out all the "hard administration stuff" you listed.

Setting up a science project at home in your toy AWS account I'm sure is no big deal.

But this is true of every tech- "works on my box" is always easier than "doing this in enterprise".

The measure of a technology is how easy it is to use in the real production environment.

Being in a large organization does not equal having a dedicated team for running Kubernetes clusters. For example Daimler (the company behind brands like Mercedes) has hundreds of Kubernetes clusters across hundreds of small product teams.

IMHO, the biggest annoyance and difficulty with K8s, is figuring out the helm chart ecosystem with the crazy templated YAML. Some of those documents can get quite convoluted. One family of charts (say, from Bitami) will have one set of conventions for values.yaml, and other families will have a slightly different way of organizing this.

You can just not use helm. Kustomize, which is built-in, does almost everything needed and is much simpler.

But then you have an entirely different challenge if you want to use a project that only provides a chart as a deployment package / docs.

Try checking out kpt, it does packages and hydration.

https://kpt.dev/

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