HN tends to follow tech hype cycles, Kubernetes is entering the “trough of disillusionment” now that people are starting to use it in anger. This reminds me of prior fights like Solaris vs Linux. Kubernetes is not that bad, its actually quite elegant in many ways. It’s just that it is tackling a hard problem in the hardest way possible: by providing a new set of bottom up abstractions to replace traditional virtual machines, config management, and network and storage virtualization in the image of the Google model of massive scale workload scheduling. That means it is a whole new world to learn but you can’t quite forget about the old world yet, and need to map between the two. Is it complicated? Yeah, mainly because it’s evolving so fast and serving many audiences. It will get easier.
Simpler alternatives? Any PaaS like Heroku or Google App Engine or Cloud Foundry.
Or a serverless function platform like AWS lambda (not sure if it’s “simpler” but it is getting there)
Disclaimer I work for Pivotal who sells cloud foundry and a distro of Kubernetes
Bundle your code in a zip file. Describe it in a yaml template with the name, runtime, zip filename, memory needed, entry point in your code, and external HTTP path. Deploy it with "aws cloudformation package" and "aws cloudformation deploy".
The platform will give you load balancing, scaling, logging, metrics, internal and external endpoints, DNS, and CDN.
The PaaS platforms you mentioned are basically the same (you provide code + a bit of config and they do the rest), except priced by the hour.
The plumbing involved with Lambda tends to be onerous, as does debugging. But for many cases I completely agree it is simpler and a glimpse of the future...
I get the sense that the naysayers outweight the supporters, simply because the headline alone is not news. Don't let them deter you, spend a few hours and decide for yourself.
