[zerbin]

> k8s is a terrible experience and a terrible abstraction. I'm not smart enough to do better but I'm smart enough to know it terrible. It's snake-oil

If you're running Kubernetes on bare metal then I don't blame you for having a bad impression. I can't help you understand that your problems are almost certainly to do with a group of "hardcore Ops" guys trying to do everything GKE or EKS gives you for free while neglecting your actual needs, not to do with Kubernetes itself, which is most useful when Google just creates a cluster for you and you can immediately start dumping manifests into it.

> at my company, a bunch of devops folks that deployed k8s 80% of the way left soon later to make 2x the pay as contractors at other companies to help them push through their last 80%. This is another reason that there is a lack of parity on the new infrastructure. Unfortunately, everyone is still stuck at 80%. Strange.

Again, this isn't really to do with k8s is it? Probably better to point the finger at management for not retaining the people who they needed to run k8s or listening to your complaints trying to work with something 80% done instead of 100%. At my company we used k8s 110% for everything and have amazing support for it, and as a dev it's a dream come true. For people who don't understand Ops, it can be difficult, but when you open the "DevOps" box of saying "Devs own their services in production" for the first time, you're bound to do a lot of learning. I see this in my teammates a lot, who have basically zero understanding of how things actually deploy or run once they've left their local machine.