[justinsb]

This frustrates me greatly, only because I agree with you so vehemently :-) We have an open issue tracker where real decisions are made, and so engineers will argue about different approaches. Compare to alternatives, where you see demos that are double-acts of good-cop vs good-cop where apparently there are no trade-offs and everything is perfect. It isn't my experience that products where the debates are hidden are better; it is certainly easier to see the compromises when the debates are public.

So: there was a big discussion about whether a single k8s cluster should span multiple AZs (which shipped in 1.2), or whether we should allow the API to target multiple independent clusters (federation, the first version of which is shipping in 1.3). The core of the argument is that multi-zone is simpler for most users, but with only one control plane it is less reliable than a federation of totally independent clusters. Federation also brings other benefits, like solving the problem of running in clusters that are not in a single "datacenter" i.e. where you need to worry about non-uniform latency. I haven't seen anyone else make a serious attempt at solving this.

So, remember that the issue tracker is filled with the unvarnished discussions that come from true open source development. I think it is an asset for you, because you don't discover those things 3 months into using your chosen product; but it is definitely a liability for k8s, because we rely on you realizing this in your initial evaluation and weighting appropriately (the devil you know vs the devil you don't). I think k8s is likely much better than you think it is, and you should come talk to us on slack and make sure of that fact! It certainly sounds like you have an interesting use case that we'd like to hear about and consider.

But yes, our docs should be better!