[swozey]

There are almost 24k people in the k8s.slack.io #kubernetes-users channel and it's only a small portion of the actual community. For instance I rarely see people from other huge K8s consumers, like Lyft, Zalando, Walmart, etc in the channel (high probability they just don't mention where they are or I never noticed).

I won't deny actual k8s experts are low in abundance right now. It's a complex platform in its near infancy. There are people brand new to k8s embarking on the journey to learn it every day in slack. Give them 6mo+ or another year and you'll have a few near experts and a ton of just generally experienced admins.

I don't feel as though it's any different from when I was working on my CCIE. When I was working on that there were only 18k other people out there who had CCIEs. I very rarely met one or even someone with just that level of skill (I'm not in the Bay Area/NYC). I had to ask questions through newsgroups and IRC and in IRC there were maybe 4-10 people at that level out of thousands. You could say there are thousands of networks out there that need a CCIE to run them but that isn't ever what happened; you'd have a CCIE basically lead from the top and their skill/experience would trickle down to lesser experienced netengs or they'd be brought in as consultants when necessary. I've worked with very few CCIEs. I see k8s going the same way. Every State will likely have a handful of experts on the subject while there will remain a ton of CCNA/CCNP level k8s admins and you just need to determine how complex your k8s infrastructure is and what level you'll need to hire to effectively manage it.

Brendan Burns goal is to democratize ephemeral infrastructure so that anyone who can code can manage it. That's another topic entirely but the community is starting to output enough general guidance in the form of blogs, books, slack, et al. that hopping into the ecosystem now is basically a breeze compared to what it was when I got involved in the 1.x days.

Could just be that I'm a masochist and like learning painful things.

My biggest complaint about k8s right now is the lack of real-world production knowledge being distributed. A lot of people set up a cluster and leave it and never optimize it or make it actually production-ready. My goal is to significantly accelerate that through training, blogs, etc.

[user5994461]

18k CCIE is magnitudes more than the current amount of kubernetes experts.

It's also not comparable. A network is setup only once by a CCIE. It's done and it doesn't need touching for the next 10 years.

A kubernetes cluster is setup once and then the troubles begin. Constant care needed every week for 10 years.

[swozey]

The first real CCIE certificate awarded was in 1993, #1025. 18k was something in like the year 2005 when I was in my early 20s.

Kubernetes was barely a blip on the map until 2017. There was Cisco routing and switching hardware LONG before there was even a CCIE certification.

This is a new ecosystem. Of course it takes time to develop experts.

A CCIE not touching a network for 10 years? That's ludicrous. I was a network engineer. I wish that was even remotely the case. I was constantly fighting firmware/bugs/etc. In fact I swore off Cisco and began working on my JNCIE at some point to stick with Juniper which of course had it's own issues.

I've run k8s 1.5 in production for 2 years on various clusters. That is almost a 2 year old release. I've had zero k8s specific problems. I recently migrated those clusters to 1.9 and apart from updating some API endpoints that changed over the major releases, and a lot of annotations that changed, it was very little actual work. It was mostly tedious "find & replace" work.

I'm not going to bullshit people. K8s has its bugs, quirks and is complex, but there seem to be a huge number of people who run away in fear on HN.

It can be understood. I didn't even know how to use Docker before I jumped into learning k8s.