Updated original comment to clarify :)

Although, to be fair, the article is about GKE.

Have you seen kops? rancher? loft? I don't think its that terrible to manage k8s at all using the tools available to you. k8s definitely used to be be difficult to manage but that isn't the case anymore.

But literally every cloud provider out there has a managed solution so at this point you really only need to do it for DC work or if you like to do it.

Amazon - EKS Google - GKE Azure - AKS

anything beyond those 3 is a rounding error but...

Linode - LKE DigitalOcean - DigitalOcean Kubernetes IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service Rackspace - KAAS

I've used Rancher and while it is very nice it still punts a lot of the hard bits like interacting with the outside network, vm creation, and storage (especially shared persistent storage) to the ops team to figure out.

Creating a big-ole cluster of app servers was never really the hard ops problem which is what k8s does really well.

Creating the cluster of servers isn't the value of kubernetes. We all had clusters of servers well before k8s, openstack, and things like AWS.

The benefit of k8s is the orchestration of those clusters. Spinning up 6 new http servers and getting them added to the load balancer automatically. Generating 4 new memcached nodes and getting them registered in DNS so clients pick them up and add them to the hashring.

The benefit of k8s is the scaling and elastic capabilities. It can trigger vertical scaling by spinning up larger pods or horizontal scaling by adding/removing pods.

Anyone thinking that people are using k8s because it can create app servers doesn't understand why anyone is using k8s. If all we needed to do is create a cluster of app servers, we wouldn't be using k8s.

That being said, a cluster of app servers still needs orchestration and config management and we had a ton of crazy solutions for that prior to k8s.

I previously managed my companies Kubernetes clusters using Kops on AWS. My company switched to Google, so I had to move everything to GKE. I miss Kops, it gave me more control and made life easier. I don't want to use the old crappy deprecated DNS server, but with GKE that's what you get. I don't get to control what goes on the masters on my clusters because they're not mine anymore. Having GKE do the masters means more headaches and complexity because I no longer have control. I love K8s, but GKE does a pretty poor job implementing it. It boggles my mind that the main company behind K8s is so incompetent in implementing it.

Its a bit of a pain, but you can definitely switch to CoreDNS on GKE if you need to. Also as someone who has used GKE, EKS, MicroK8s, and Minikube, I would say that the easiest to use implementation of Kubenetes as a Service is GKE. Not saying its easy or the worlds most thought out product, but I gotta give google just a tiny bit of credit for at least being easier to use then the competition.

If your company is implementing and managing their own k8s clusters they are doing it wrong. Use a cloud hosted solution.