There is a fundamental misunderstanding people have about technology that you only get from operating and maintaining it. There's what something can do, and then there's actually doing it.
K8s is complicated as hell to learn to use. Its learning curve is very shallow. Yes, you can get a "hello world" running quickly, but that is not the benchmark for whether you actually understand what's going on, or how to make it do what you need.
But once you do learn it thoroughly, it's ridiculously fast to ramp up on it and use it for very complex things, very quickly. As a developer medium, as an operational medium, it accelerates the kind of modern practices (that for some reason most people still don't know about?) that can produce a lot of value.
But that's if someone else is building and maintaining the underlying "guts" of it for you. If you try to build it from scratch and maintain it on bare metal, suddenly it's incredibly complicated again with another shallow learning curve and a lot of effort. And that effort continues, because they keep changing the fucking thing every 6-12 months...
It's like learning to drive a car or ride a bike. At first it's difficult and time-consuming. But then you get it, and you can ride around pretty easily, and it can take you far. However, that does not mean you understand car/bike mechanics, or can take it apart and rebuild it when something breaks. So be prepared to pay someone for that maintenance, or be prepared to become a mechanic (and do that work while also doing your day job). This analogy is stretched thinner by the fact that nobody's constantly changing how your car works...
K8s is complicated as hell to learn to use. Its learning curve is very shallow. Yes, you can get a "hello world" running quickly, but that is not the benchmark for whether you actually understand what's going on, or how to make it do what you need.
But once you do learn it thoroughly, it's ridiculously fast to ramp up on it and use it for very complex things, very quickly. As a developer medium, as an operational medium, it accelerates the kind of modern practices (that for some reason most people still don't know about?) that can produce a lot of value.
But that's if someone else is building and maintaining the underlying "guts" of it for you. If you try to build it from scratch and maintain it on bare metal, suddenly it's incredibly complicated again with another shallow learning curve and a lot of effort. And that effort continues, because they keep changing the fucking thing every 6-12 months...
It's like learning to drive a car or ride a bike. At first it's difficult and time-consuming. But then you get it, and you can ride around pretty easily, and it can take you far. However, that does not mean you understand car/bike mechanics, or can take it apart and rebuild it when something breaks. So be prepared to pay someone for that maintenance, or be prepared to become a mechanic (and do that work while also doing your day job). This analogy is stretched thinner by the fact that nobody's constantly changing how your car works...