[siegecraft]

How do you reconcile "ops is hard" with "just run some vms, CM, etc."? Is it because ops only becomes hard when you force yourself to use k8 when it's not really needed?

Also do people really think k8 is a drop-in/trivial solution? I just got done evaluating it and the overriding sentiment seemed to be "it's super flexible but super complex and badly documented and you'd better hope you're using the happiest of happy paths."

[heurist]

My anecdotal experience: I only started working with Docker and distributed systems in January and I've been through a couple iterations of provisioning, deployment, and orchestration since then - started with docker-machine and docker-compose, added in swarm, private registries, and a set of bash scripts, now moving to kubernetes - and I am finding that kubernetes handles many tricky components out of the box with very little effort. I wouldn't have understood how to use it four months ago but now that I've implemented much of it myself I understand the underlying architecture and design goals and find it to be a better solution than the tools I've put together. It took me a few days to see if it would do everything I needed and understand how to configure it, which I suppose could be seen as complexity, but it took me much longer to understand how to run docker in production in the first place since I had to learn and build it all without prior knowledge. Kubernetes has been a cakewalk in comparison. If I ever need to set up a cluster from scratch again I'll be using k8s.

[TheIronYuppie]

Disclosure: I work at Google on Kubernetes.

We're always looking to improve on both complexity and documentation - but, as Kelsey pointed out in his tutorial, it's definitely got a few steps. The biggest question is would you really want any fewer? That is to say, you could use a hosted solution (like Google Container Engine) or set up with a one-line command, but most people who want to run at production scale definitely want individual steps so they can customize.