[stackskipton]

SRE here, when most people say "Server Management" they are talking the root of their problem. "I have this set of Applications and that need to run on this fleet of servers. How do I do this?" and Kubernetes is commonly the answer but not only answer.

Yes, you still need to something to "install" the Kubernetes but that is generally easier surface area with something like Talos OS, K3s, whatever Canonical/Red Hat cooked up.

[temp0826]

Kubernetes is only another application to me, it just manages containers (which probably run applications, which may be serving something, I guess?). Definitions have got a bit muddy since the advent of devops imo! (Maybe part of the weirdness is that this post is about an app that manages crons and files and other os-level stuff)

[stackskipton]

Sure, it's just another application technically. On more practical level, it's pretty much an OS.

[jauntywundrkind]

There's systems like Talos where you are pretty much explicitly not allowed to touch Linux, where essentially the only thing the computer presents that you can control is Kubernetes itself. At that point, the OS is kubernetes basically; I find it much harder to entertain pretenses that it's not when you get that far along. https://github.com/siderolabs/talos

But it's really a gradient. As more and more services and systems move from being systemd services (or whatever) to in kubernetes, I see it as the position along a gradient shifting. Both are operating systems. They're different operating systems, doing different things, but both manage and provide resources for user payloads, both run apps, both host a user interface (apiserver for kubernetes), both have state (also apiserver, vs file-systems).