[mkulke]

Agreed. I am deeply impressed about how "approachable" kubernetes actually is, considering what it does. The overall design concepts are quite simple and the reasoning behind them is clear. It's a small set of self-contained components (api, controller, scheduler, kubelet, proxy sitting on coreos' etcd), so the complexity is fairly manageable. Peeking into the source code of components won't give you the creeps and the build system (cross-compiling) could not be any easier.

I have not yet tried any other docker orchestration framework (there seem to be a few popping up right now), but concerning clustering: In comparison Mesos appears intimidating to me (there is certainly not the 2min "I get this" experience, I've had with tools like etcd & kubernetes) and I remember building clusters w/ technology like heartbeat, corosync, openais & drbd not so long ago - compared to this distributed computing became incredibly easy.

My advise for starters would be to pick some ready2go vagrant-coreos-setup and get it running on your workstation, this should be pretty straightforward. (We are running k8s on openstack/rackspace and there were too many moving parts involved to get the included starter-scripts to reliably bootstrap a kubernetes installation)

Then look at the user-data/cloud-init of that project and try to rebuild things on your preferred stack from the bottom upwards, step after step - I feel a lot more sovereign when doing that. The components' logfiles are actually helpful when you assemble things. It also helps to look at the generated (and documented, thx for this) iptables nat rules, when you have problems with service discovery/communication.