The kind of people who has to both set the cluster up and keep it up and also has to develop the application and deploy it and keep it up etc is not the target audience.
K8s shines when the roles of managing the cluster and running workloads on it are separated. It defines a good contract between infrastructure and workload. It lets different people focus on different aspects.
Yes it still has rough edges, things that are either not there yet, or vestigial complexity of wrong turns that happened through it's history. But if you look at it through the lense of this corporate scenario it starts making more sense than when you just think of what a full-stack dev in a two person startup would rather use and fully own/understand.
It's hard to make tests maintainable. Doubly so if you aren't already versed in techniques to make code maintainable.
I wonder sometimes if we aren't repeating the same experiment with ops right now.
Are you following "k8s the hard way"? I've never had this problem; either:
`gcloud container clusters create`
Or
`install docker-for-mac`
And you have a k8s cluster up and running. Maybe it's more work on AWS?
Kubernetes is fine, but setting it up kind of feels like I'm trying to earn a PhD thesis. Swarm is dog-simple to get working and I've really had no issues in the three years that I've been running it.
The configs aren't as elaborate or as modular as Kubernetes, and that's a blessing as well as a curse; it's easy to set up and administer, but you have less control. Still, for small-to-mid-sized systems, I would still recommend Swarm.