Kubernetes is a way to handle complexity with infrastructure and operations that is codified and implemented as a single standardized and portable solution. Much of what K8S does is replace what you would be doing manually or by tying together many other tools yourself.

That's completely different than taking a simple blogging site and turning it into some distributed monstrosity.

Kubernetes is a low level tool which should be used only at large companies with large teams to support it and build all the required tooling around it.

80% of companies building on top of kubernetes should just pay some provider to do it for them, or use higher level tools. The crazyness going in the DevOps/Infrastructure world is as bad, or worse, as the one going on in the frontend space.

Kubernetes provides a standardized way to deploy application artifacts to multiple servers, and handles monitoring, logging, process management, storage, networking, security, isolation, high-availability, rolling deployments, and other concerns in a industry-standard way that is portable across providers.

It's just software that runs your software. You can't remove complexity, only abstract it. Instead of using Chef/Puppet/systemd/hand-written scripts and a bunch of other tools to run and monitor your processes, you can replace all that with K8S.

> "used only at large companies with large teams"

Actually it's even more useful with smaller teams and let me, as a team of 1, deploy a global ad platform running billions of requests a day across hundreds of servers in multiple regions. Don't mistake lack of knowledge and experience as a problem with the tool.

> "pay some provider to do it for them"

Yes, you should use a managed K8S offering. Using K8S doesn't mean you have to install and operate it from scratch.

GCP's Autopilot k8s is basically point-and-click. Literally takes few minutes to get up and running. It even creates CI/CD pipelines for you.

As with everything else, setting up things is not the problem. The problem is maintaning them.

It takes much less effort to maintain k8s deployments than to maintain bespoke, randomly cobbled together ones.

> Much of what K8S does is replace what you would be doing manually or by tying together many other tools yourself

So that's where it's wrong IMO, it replaces simple static site hosting/managers/etc, instead of having a single-click toolchain that takes your commits and CI/CD it properly, you now have to install and maintain that yourself manually.`

There are many CI/CD pipelines that deploy to K8S.

The "simple static site hosting" isn't magic, it's usually nothing more than a wrapper around putting your code into a nodejs docker container and deploying it to some lambda/serverless platform with a CDN in front. Your post is exactly what I mean about many frontend devs not understanding backend or infrastructure resulting in convoluted architectures.