It’s mainly running your own control plane that is complex. Managed k8s (EKS, AKS, GKE) is not difficult at all. Don’t listen to all the haters. It’s the same crowd who think they can replace systemd with self hacked init scripts written in bash, because they don’t trust abstractions and need to see everything the computer does step-by-step.
I also stayed away for a long time due to all the fear spread here, after taking the leap, I’m not looking back.
The lightweight “simpler” alternative is docker-compose. I put simpler in quotes because once you factor in all the auxiliary software needed to operate the compose files in a professional way (IaC, Ansible, monitoring, auth, VM provisioning, ...), you will accumulate the same complexity yourself, only difference is you are doing it with tools that may be more familiar to what you are used to. Kubernetes gives you a single point of control plane for all this. Does it come with a learning curve? Yes, but once you get over it there is nothing inherent about it that makes it unnecessary complex. You don’t need autoscaler, replicasets and those more advanced features just because you are on k8s.
If you want to go even simpler, the clouds have offerings to just run a container, serverless, no fuzz around. I have to warn everyone though that using ACI on Azure was the biggest mistake of my career. Conceptually it sounds like a good idea but Azures execution of it is just a joke. Updating a very small container image taking upwards of 20-30 minutes, no logs on startup crashes, randomly stops serving traffic, bad integration with storage.
I also stayed away for a long time due to all the fear spread here, after taking the leap, I’m not looking back.
The lightweight “simpler” alternative is docker-compose. I put simpler in quotes because once you factor in all the auxiliary software needed to operate the compose files in a professional way (IaC, Ansible, monitoring, auth, VM provisioning, ...), you will accumulate the same complexity yourself, only difference is you are doing it with tools that may be more familiar to what you are used to. Kubernetes gives you a single point of control plane for all this. Does it come with a learning curve? Yes, but once you get over it there is nothing inherent about it that makes it unnecessary complex. You don’t need autoscaler, replicasets and those more advanced features just because you are on k8s.
If you want to go even simpler, the clouds have offerings to just run a container, serverless, no fuzz around. I have to warn everyone though that using ACI on Azure was the biggest mistake of my career. Conceptually it sounds like a good idea but Azures execution of it is just a joke. Updating a very small container image taking upwards of 20-30 minutes, no logs on startup crashes, randomly stops serving traffic, bad integration with storage.