The levels of abstraction seem to be a hazing ritual that seems to be a point of pride sometimes. I also imagine it's good job security for those who spent years on these tools.

Aw man. When I started in this industry we made new employees build their work PC from parts.

Yep, exactly this. Whenever I try to grasp it, I feel like things are being abstracted beyond comprehension. It doesn’t feel right.

That, and the fact that it seems like you need to adopt about 100 completely heterogeneous tools to successfully manage a Kubernetes cluster.

I went from using Singularity to bundle scientific tools for HPC cluster useage at my university straight into admining OpenShift at my current employer and I have to say it was not a smooth transition. Felt like a complete idiot for a good amount of time. But after spending a few months with it I’ve really gotten to see the power and use for the k8s infrastructure and its value as a tool/platform.

And honestly, I’m digging it. It’s really cool stuff and once you get developers writing production services and applications that would otherwise have been virtualized on dedicated systems on it, they love it to for their speed of delivery and development. But we’re also managing hundreds of projects with multiple applications/services with high availability, so OCP/Kube makes sense for us.