[doctorpangloss]

Helm and Kustomize are low-budget custom resource definitions. They serve their purpose well and they have few limitations considering how much they can achieve before you write your own controllers.

In my opinion, the complexity is symptomatic of success: once you make a piece of some kind of seemingly narrowly focused software that people actually use, you wind up also creating a platform, if not a platform-of-platforms, in order to satisfy growth. Kubernetes can scale for that business case in ways Docker Swarm, ELB, etc. do not.

Is system configuration avoidable? In order to use AWS, you have to know how a VPC works. That is the worst kind of configuration. I suppose you can ignore that stuff for a very long time, you'll be paying ridiculous amounts of money for the privilege - almost the same in bandwidth costs, transiting NAT gateways and all your load balancers, whatever mistakes you made, as you do in compute usage. Once you learn that bullshit, you know, Kubernetes isn't so tedious after all.