Instead, you can now admin a Rube Goldberg machine of Helm charts, which run a pile Docker containers which are each their own microcosm of outdated packages and security vulnerabilities.

> Rube Goldberg machine of Helm charts

I love k8s but I do want to say that I hate the 'standard' way that people write general purpose Helm charts. They all try to be super configurable and template everything, but most make assumptions that undermine that idea, and I end up having to dig through them to make changes anyway.

I have found much more success by writing my own helm charts for everything I deploy, and putting in exactly the amount of templating that makes sense for me. Much more simple that way. Doing things this way has avoided a Rube Goldberg scenario.

your argument seems to be "its ok if youre rube goldberg"

just wait till you have a predecessor

That's the opposite of my argument. I'm saying that the predominant style is Rube Goldberg, but Helm charts don't have to be written that way. Instead of writing an unreadable mess that is 90% template, just template the 5% that you need, and the whole thing is very readable.

thats what you are hearing. what everyone else is hearing: "_my_ code is self documenting, so obviously its more legible!"

This x10. Each such setup is a unique snowflake of brittle Ansible/Bash scripts and unit files. Anything slightly different from the initial use case will break.

Not to mention operations. K8s give you for free things that are a pain to setup otherwise. Want to autoscale your VMs based on load? Trivial in most cloud managed k8s.