Except with the kernel, you only have to be familiar with the system calls and you don't need a team of people just to run, maintain and upgrade the kernel.

That and it tries to make breaking changes on the timescale of decades rather than every other minor release (so, once or twice a year?).

> Except with the kernel, you only have to be familiar with the system calls

I think it's safe to assume that any non-trivial use of linux involves non-default configuration.

> you don't need a team of people just to run, maintain and upgrade the kernel.

My relatively small company employed linux admins before we adopted (on prem) kubernetes. Their work has changed a bit since since then, but it isn't meaningfully more laborious.

I assume that less effort is required for cloud kubernetes offerings.

My whole point is that they're not really comparable from a level of effort perspective, despite claims.

Hosted Kubernetes isn't significantly easier either, as every host is offering you different things as "Kubernetes" and has different ways that you will need to manually intervene to overcome problems.

I'm only telling you this from experience, being years down the rabbit hole already.

I also speak from experience, from an organization that has had a lot of success with kubernetes. Perhaps we're in the sweet spot where our workload is suited for it but there still isn't a huge amount of complexity in maintaining it.