[justinsb]

I do a lot of work for k8s on AWS (e.g. I'm to blame for the original under-the-hood document). I agree with most of what you've said we need to improve on, and we are working on it! We added a bunch of ELB configuration options in 1.3 and we'll likely complete the ELB feature set in 1.4 (it probably would have landed in 1.4 but for my tardiness in doing reviews). In addition, there's a well-known "trick" where you set up a service using a NodePort and then set up the ELB to point to that, if you want to go beyond what k8s offers (e.g. if you want to reuse an existing ELB etc). What our docs are lacking, we make up for with an excellent community (for AWS discussions #sig-aws on the k8s slack).

The debate between automation vs simplification is one that has gone on since k8s 1.0 and likely will continue to be had. But I think to an extent it is a false choice: I created a new k8s installation/ops tool (i.e. did work on the "automation" side), and out of that I got a fairly clear road-map for how we could simplify the installation dramatically in 1.4. In other words, some of the simplification you ask for comes by embedding the right pieces of the automation. k8s is open-source, so I have to persuade others of this approach, but I think that's a good thing, and I'd hope you'd join in that discussion also (e.g. #sig-cluster-lifecycle on the k8s slack).