That's the same with.. the Linux kernel? I'd wager that most services people write have less complexity than the the kernel it runs on. We choose to do that not because we need its full feature set, but because it gives us useful abstractions.
Exactly, I think I could have stated it better. Using k8s is strictly more complex from the perspective of the operator, and the mountain I'm referring to isn't actually from k8s itself but from all the 3rd party stuff you have to layer on to actually make it useful-- things like cluster-autoscaler, vpa, kube-prometheus, aws-load-balancer-controller, misc. operators, that fall on my side of the wall when it comes to fixing it when it's broken.
I can understand that it doesn't come off that way but I actually like k8s and the surrounding ecosystem. But deploying k8s makes your infrastructure as complicated as k8s itself, which can be a massive win because it works in both directions.
If it can’t be monolithic like *BSD, at least offer distributions like the Linux Sphere. Like a ready to go LAMP stack. Or a collection of services (Database, Storage, Logs,…)
There are distributions of k8s for years now. Starting from simple side like k3s, through more complex (k0s, rancher, etc), to complete OS images (Talos, Metropolis)
I’m running Talos locally and run into basically none of these issues — use one of the provided storage providers, dump a container into it, bing bang boom you’re done.
And similarly, you don't need any configuration at all to just run k8s itself, you do need to configure your application and pay attention when exposing things, but the same holds true for an OS on a single machine.
I believe the OS comparison is the most apt, both in the sense of the layer it represents, i.e. abstracting away physical machines and managing resources for applications, but also from what it means: one used to have to rewrite a program for each new computer as they were all unique (incl. CPU), just like each corp had its own way of managing infrastructure, clusters of nodes and automation.
Any new application needed to be integrated from the ground up, which might be simpler in that you only touch what you actually need, but you also have to do it every single time, and it's different for each project/corp - with the vast majority missing out on the more complex bits that don't fit into an nginx config and some shell scripts.
