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cyberpunk06/16/20255 repliesview on HN

i really don’t know where this complexity thing comes from anymore. maybe back in the day where a k8s cluster was a 2 hour kubespray run or something but it’s now a single yaml file and a ssh key if you use something like rke.


Replies

hombre_fatal06/16/2025

You are so used to the idiosyncrasies of k8s that you are probably blind to them. And you are probably so experienced with the k8s stack that you can easily debug issues so you discount them.

Not long ago, I was using Google Kubernetes Engine when DNS started failing inside the k8s cluster on a routine deploy that didn't touch the k8s config.

I hacked on it for quite some time before I gave up and decided to start a whole new cluster. At which point I decided to migrate to Linode if I was going to go through the trouble. It was pretty sobering.

Kubernetes has many moving parts that move inside your part of the stack. That's one of the things that makes it complex compared to things like Heroku or Google Cloud Run where the moving parts run in the provider's side of the stack.

It's also complex because it does a lot compared to pushing a container somewhere. You might be used to it, but that doesn't mean it's not complex.

esseph06/16/2025

Running large deployments on bare metal and managing the software and firmware lifecycle still has significant complexity. Modern tooling makes things much better - but it's not "easy".

The kubernetes iceberg is 3+ years old but still fairly accurate.

https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/u9b95u/kubernet...

vanillax06/16/2025

I was gonna echo this. K8s is rather easy to setup. Certificates, domains, CICD ( flux/argo ) is where some completely comes in.. If anyone wants to learn more I do have a video I think is the most straight forward yet productionalized capable setup for hosting at home.

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xp8406/16/2025

A few years ago, I set up a $40 k8s "cluster" which consisted of a couple of nodes, at DigitalOcean, and I set it up using this tutorial: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-auto...

I was able to create a new service and deploy it with a couple of simple, ~8-line ymls and the cluster takes care of setting up DNS on a subdomain of my main domain, wiring up Lets Encrypt, and deploying the container. Deploying the latest version of my built container image was one kubectl command. I loved it.

notnmeyer06/16/2025

i assume when people are talking about k8s complexity, it’s either more complicated scenarios, or they’re not talking about managed k8s.

even then though, it’s more that complex needs are complex and not so much that k8s is the thing driving the complexity.

if your primary complexity is k8s you either are doing it wrong or chose the wrong tool.

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