k8s is meant to be hard to use. You're supposed to rent space on a k8s cluster from Google. Google has been pumping millions into marketing k8s as a mechanism to improve GCP adoption and establish a foothold in the cloud provider space.

I'm not exactly sure what point you're trying to make here. k8s is not meant to be a paas, but no one is trying to make k8s harder to use.

I work at Google on a large team of engineers dedicated to making it as easy as possible to use.

[Disclaimer: this is pure conjecture and represents my opinion only; I'm a Google outsider.]

For a while, "AWS" and "the cloud" were practical synonyms; it was very rare that anyone meant not-AWS. In my opinion, Kubernetes is a major piece of Google's strategy to turn that tide and improve their marketshare.

Does throwing "a large team of engineers" at a problem typically result in something that's "as easy as possible to use"? "Design-by-committee" is not a term of endearment.

A sibling comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18958077 notes that "there are a ton of nicer UIs for Kubernetes", but that they're sold separately as proprietary PaaS platforms. Even if we pretend like GCP/GKE isn't one of them, Kubernetes-The-Platform will be impacted by the interests of its primary vendors and advocates, whether or not certain teams at Google are keen to admit that.

The fact it takes a team of highly skilled engineers from the top of the talent pool trying to make it easy should tell you perhaps the design is wrong ?

Or that to run a secured, highly available platform with the type of features k8s provides is non-trivial beyond basics.

What would make it easy is a good non-gcp GUI

I agree, some better UI for end users would be awesome: Kubernetes Dashboard kind of works, but is pretty limited and more a "kubectl in the browser". There are a ton of nicer UIs for Kubernetes, but they are all part of the value-add of proprietary platforms AFAIK (think about all the managed K8s offerings out there).