It's not complicated per se, but the industry makes it complicated. Running a basic web app isn't complicated if you throw up a server, but if you use Kubernetes then you've suddenly made things much harder.

Things are only as hard as we make them.

As someone who just went from zero to a working Kubernetes implementation, like a lot of things in tech, the problem isn't the tool: it's how others explain it.

The tool is excellent and extremely well-conceived. Being able to spin up a highly scalable fault-tolerant system with a few manifest files is impressive. The only frustration I ran into was trying to understand which files I needed when vs. what was unnecessary and intended for a special use case.

It depends on your scale of course. It’s not like “the industry” just wants to make things complicated for the fun of it. There comes a point where you’ll need more than one server to host your web app and when you do Kubernetes provides a nice abstraction in addition to providing a ton of other useful things at scale like infrastructure as code to zero downtime, continuous deployments.

> It’s not like “the industry” just wants to make things complicated for the fun of it.

Doesn't it? I think that there are plenty of folks who want to make things more complicated, because complicated things are fun, while just making things work can be a pain but also boring.

Thanks I got the gist. Peaking at our internal website yes we extensively use K8 guess it is needed there.

Computers are hard to manage as easily as our codebases for a lot of reasons. But it should also be known that the field is fairly young and there's a lot of competing ideas while we're trying to keep the lights on with software from several decades ago that keep paying the bills. This is not a challenge that we incentivize our best engineers to tackle necessarily because our industry currently values pumping out more features than actually streamlining existing features. It's also not clear whether some of these problems can be solved with "better" engineering rather than a completely new way of approaching software systems. From a project / engineer alignment perspective, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JNXx8VdbAE

I wouldn't call it just DevOps. It's computers. We can all do what we do, we can write our `print "Hello World"` because we leverage millions upon millions of lines of code that other people have written to abstract away the other complications to getting code shipped.

It's both amazing and terrifying to think about.