[caniszczyk]

How many people understand how the Linux kernel works from top to bottom? There are more than a handful of cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Microsoft, Alibaba etc) that offer a completely managed Kubernetes experience, for most folks, this will be good enough and you don't need to understand everything in order to take advantage of Kubernetes, similar how you don't need to understand how the kernel (think POSIX) works: https://www.cncf.io/certification/software-conformance/

[falcolas]

You're right. You don't have to know anything about Linux to run software on it... until you do. Until you have to understand and modify swap. Until you have to understand and change the various schedulers (for both processes and disk operations). Until you have to troubleshoot networking problems. Until you have to change a kernel setting to avoid a 0-day exploit. Until you have to encrypt all communication because a client said so.

Being on AWS or Azure or Microsoft doesn't shield you from these needs.

[bpicolo]

The job isn't typically to be an expert from day one, the job is to learn and develop as things come up. Field experience is how you, over time, build those skills.

[pieterh_pvtl]

If you're going distributed the first place, doesn't that often imply that big team / big codebase?

In those cases, I'd argue things will likely come up quite quickly. Kubernetes is key component of a platform, but not a PaaS, e.g. you are required to understand to low level stuff, even if it's managed by a public cloud provider.

Cue out of memory apps, recovering GB+ JVM thread dumps out of a transient container, lack of troubleshooting tools, the kinda of stuff falcolas said above, plus high pressure to resolve because it's highly visible production app and you're got a recipe for sadness.

Even at google AFAIK, K8S ran in the context of BORG/ BORGMON and a host of other internal tools.