[dsnuh]

Yeah, I'm not buying that there are thousands of k8s "Seniors" out there, and they just aren't the people that are being hired. I've been in operations for 20 years, and I think I would qualify for what you would call "good devops" in that I am a generalist with a wide breadth of experience in systems as well as programming. Kubernetes is a beast. We run it from scratch, in production, and just keeping up with the changes since the project inception can be maddening.

I did much of the early research POCs for my company when the idea of containerization really took off, and my deployments would seem to not have a shelf life of more than a few days before I would have to conform to some new method they came up with. I was using Tectonic when it was first released and the documentation would change underneath me as I would try to set up the clusters. It's a LOT to keep up with.

I can understand and explain to someone every protocol or idea underlying Kubernetes, sure, because they build upon standards that we have all used before in operations. But to try to understand how it is all working together within Kubernetes, and then add in the complex interplay if you are like us and integrate with non-k8s systems that have comlex firewall and routing rules now to allow the intercommunication... add in Calico or Flannel...Docker under the sheets with all its warts...it's a lot to manage. You need people that are engaged with the k8s project at a level that would normally be reserved for Googlers working on it.

Don't get me wrong... I like Kubernetes for the most part. I do agree that if you are planning to run in-house, you are in for some challenges, and that you will need a very high caliber of operations team to deploy and maintain it.