[williamcotton]

The point was that too many firms focus on Kubernetes as a thing in and of itself instead of focusing on app development.

From a business perspective it can, and most of the time does, benefit an organization to outsource app deployment.

I’ve seen first-hand organizations that have gigantic teams of DevOps working endlessly on perfecting these systems, all the while taking teeth pulled for an app developer to get a new container deployed.

[starttoaster]

It's possible that those platform engineers did a poor job exposing kubernetes to the developers, in the anecdotes you've mentioned. But there is a LOT more being instrumented in an effective deployment platform than just deploying an app somewhere. Centralized logging and metric aggregation and then visualization of those is an important aspect to any platform for app deployments that get overlooked by many naive developers. Deploying a service to some PaaS site is great until you need to extract any runtime information out of it, if it doesn't also instrument those features, which I've been a consumer of many of them that don't really do that at all. And then performant and reliable shared cluster storage is another animal altogether in on premise kubernetes clusters in particular. So far my best experience in that area has been with Ceph, which is like learning a completely different distributed system with its own complexities.

The app developer doesn't see it, but behind every decent app deployment in kubernetes, there are millions of hours of expertise in running distributed applications reliably. And the simpler deployment platforms do a good job of abstracting some of this, but from what I've seen nobody does all of that exceptionally well, and if they did, they could probably be able to charge whatever they wanted to people wanting to use it.

[fragmede]

When webmail (Gmail, Hotmail, etc) first came out, one objection I remember is that it was a bad idea, because it meant you couldn't get at your email if the service went down. How foolish of you to rely on someone else to keep their website up 100% of the time. That thinking passed as expertise in keeping systems up became its own branch of software engineering. So we forget that it's very possible to do a bad job of keeping a website up. some of the platform engineering work isn't just for show, it turns out.

[williamcotton]

You need about 10% of that functionality to reliably and profitably sell screen real estate to advertisers.