[zzyzxd]

> One thing that I think people new to it don’t realize is that it’s not at all batteries included - to get a basic managed cluster setup, you’re still going to be installing a bunch of additional controllers (ingress, cert-manager, external dns to start).

And if you can do this again, what's your solution to reverse proxy, certificate management, DNS...etc? I guess you can docker-compose some custom stack on a single machine, maybe add one more machine then you can say it's HA enough for small scale. But you can also spend the same amount of time to install those kubernetes controllers with zero customization. In my experience, if you go with the default configuration, most of the well-maintained k8s components are boring as hell these days.

> (if you’re on EKS, make sure to read about scaling and monitoring CoreDNS)

If load to your service increases, you need to scale up/out your service. This is universally true. Do you have a proprietary solution that's easier and more reliable than bumping up the replicas count in kubernetes?

There are lots of design decisions in Kubernetes that I hate. But if you want me to choose between Kubernetes and any proprietary stack, in 2026, I would definitely choose Kubernetes.

[packetlost]

I use NixOS with nginx + acme / caddy, coredns and no docker anywhere. It's extremely homogeneous, easy to scale out (add another flake output, deploy to a new server, update DNS records). You could easily automate some of that with more nix, but I don't bother because that's already only like 50 lines of config.

I have a strong preference for renting bare metal and it has served me extremely well.

[zzyzxd]

I totally believe this works for you. But in your case, isn't NixOS just another declarative orchestration system like Kubernetes? Similarly I can just run a standalone nginx, caddy with acme, and a coredns pod in a bare minimum k8s cluster.

Personally, I think the complexity is on the same level.

[packetlost]

It really isn't comparable. Sure, nixpkgs is huge, but the surface area for what you need to understand and work with is considerably smaller. They aren't even really in the same domain anyways. I was able to get very comfortable with Nix(OS) in a single weekend, but it took me months to get to a similar level with the K8s ecosystem.

[XYen0n]

NixOS has no "runtime" or controlplane to maintain.

[mikeocool]

I don’t have an answer I’m in love with today, I basically just want less moving parts.

As for EKS, having to monitor and manually scale the built in DNS service or else my queries are just going to stop resolving is not the type of thing I expect to have to manage on a managed service. I see they have finally released autoscaling for CoreDNS, though it took them 6 years.

[jaggederest]

Accidental complexity and essential complexity. There is no working system that achieves all the stated aims with fewer parts. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet

[foo4u]

I've been building multi-cluster Kubernetes for some time and things like External DNS and Ingress controllers per app are just non-starters. They always felt kludgy having K8S orchestrate things external to the cluster and their anti-patterns IMO.