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Comment by YZF | Hacker News Reader

It's the way things work together. If you want to add a new service you just annotate that service and DNS gets updated, your ingress gets the route added, cert-manager gets you the certs from let's encrypt. You want Prometheus to monitor your pod you just add the right annotation. When your server goes down k8s will move your pod around. k8s storage will take care of having the storage follow your pod. Your entire configuration is highly available and replicated in etcd.

It's just very different than your legacy "standard" technology.

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None of this is difficult to do or automate, and we've done it for years. Kubernetes simply makes it more complex by adding additional abstractions in the pursuit of pretending hardware doesn't exist.

There are, maybe, a dozen companies in the world with a large enough physical footprint where Kubernetes might make sense. Everyone else is either engaged in resume-driven development, or has gone down some profoundly wrong path with their application architecture to where it is somehow the lesser evil.

I used to feel the same way, but have come around. I think it's great for small companies for a few reasons. I can spin up effectively identical dev/ci/stg/prod clusters for a new project in an hour for a medium sized project, with CD in addition to everything GP mentioned.

I basically don't have to think about ops anymore until something exotic comes up, it's nice. I agree that it feels clunky, and it was annoying to learn, but once you have something working it's a huge time saver. The ability to scale without drastically changing the system is a bonus.

> I can spin up effectively identical dev/ci/stg/prod clusters for a new project in an hour for a medium sized project, with CD in addition to everything GP mentioned.

I can do the same thing with `make local` invoking a few bash commands. If the complexity increases beyond that, a mistake has been made.

You could say the same thing about Ansible or Vagrant or Nomad or Salt or anything else.

I can say with complete confidence however, that if you are running Kubernetes and not thinking about ops, you are simply not operating it yourself. You are paying someone else to think about it for you. Which is fine, but says nothing about the technology.

You always have to think about ops, regardless of tooling. I agree that you can have a very nice, reproducible setup with any of those tools though. Personally, I haven't found those alternatives to be significantly easier to use (though I don't have experience with Salt).

For me personally, self hosted k3s on Hetzner with FluxCD is the least painful option I've found.

Managed k8s is great if you already in the cloud, selfhosting it as a small company is waste of money.

I've found self hosted k3s to be about the same effort as EKS for my workloads, and maybe 20-30% of the cost for similar capability.

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