K8s is too complex, and I say it as k8s dev(ops) who dreams the next great thing will come soon which will save me from piles of YAMLs and will bring back programming fun ;) /s
it's just that a lot of people think they have to use k8s because it's trendy even it doesn't fit at all their needs and scale. Then they whine it's too complex.
classic PEBCAK issue.
But it is a surprisingly negative headline. Autopilot sounds like a cool tool to simplify container orchestration!
That's the Register's schtick, they're snarky about everything.
GKE Autopilot is still fundamentally Kubernetes and supports the k8s APIs. GKE has simplified a lot of Kubernetes tasks that can be a pain, such as upgrades & scaling, but as many people said on other threads Kubernetes definitely is not for all workloads. For workloads that actually do need to scale then Autopilot removes a lot of the time consuming tasks required to get Kubernetes running and staying running. There are restrictions so check the docs on if it would work for how you use k8s.
Disclosure: I run product for GKE at Google so I'm definitely not a neutral voice on this...
Interested in having someone who has had to set up 1000s of containers in k8s and hated all of it?
Google did not say "Kubernetes is too complex" but rather, they are making this new tool - called Autopilot - that is an abstraction layer on top of Kubernetes for certain types of applications / companies.
This Autopilot system still uses Kubernetes AFAICT.