Well the complexity comes not from Kubernetes per se but that the problem it wants to solve (generalized solution for distributed computing) is very hard in itself.

Only if you actually has a system complex enough to require it. A lot of systems that use kubernetes are not complex enough to require it, but use it anyway. In that case kubernetes does indeed add unnecessary complexity.

Except that k8s doesn't solve the problem of generalized distributed computing at all. (For that you need distributed fault-tolerant state handling which k8s doesn't do.)

K8s solves only one problem - the problem of organizational structure scaling. For example, when your Ops team and your Dev team have different product deadlines and different budgets. At this point you will need the insanity of k8s.

I am so happy to read that someone views kubernetes the same way I do. for many years i have been surrounded by people who "kubernetes all the things" and that is absolute madness to me.

Yes, I remember when Kubernetes hit the scene and it was only used by huge companies who needed to spin-up fleets of servers on demand. The idea of using it for small startup infra was absurd.

I love my k8s. Spend 5 minutes per month over the past 8 years and get a very reliable infra

Do you work on k8s professionally outside of the project you’re talking about?

5 mins seems unrealistic unless you’re spending time somewhere else to keep up to speed with version releases, upgrades, etc.

I think it sounds quite realistic especially if you’re using something like Talos Linux.

I’m not using k8s personally but the moment I moved from traditional infrastructure (chef server + VMs) to containers (Portainer) my level of effort went down by like 10x.

I would say even if not using Talos, Argo CD or Flux CD together with Renovate really helps to simplify the reoccuring maintenence.

You've spent less than 8 hours total on kubernetes?

As another data point, I run a k8s cluster on Hetzner (mainly for my own experience, as I'd rather learn on my pet projects vs production), and haven't had any Hetzner related issues with it.

So Hetzner is OK for the overly complex as well, if you wish to do so.

I agree. Even when Kubernetes is used in large environments, is it still cumbersome, verbose and overly complex.

What are the alternatives?

Right, who needs scalability? Each app should have a hard limit of users and just stop acceppting new users when limits are reached.

Yeah scalability is great! Let’s burn through thousands of dollars an hour and give all our money to Amazon/Google/Microsoft

When those pink slips come in, we’ll just go somewhere else and do the same thing!

You know that “scale” existed long before K8s - or even Borg - was a thing, right? I mean, how do you think Google ran before creating them?

yes and mobile phones existed before smartphones, what's the point? So far in terms of scalability nothing beats k8s. And from OpenAI and Google we also see that it even works for high performance use case such as LLM trainings with huge amounts of nodes.