I have made a good faith attempt at using it, yes. Is spending an entire week on it good faith?

I did get everything running but also saw so many settings and features I had to take on faith as being handled without understanding it. I just chose not to bother further because this seems like a minefield of problems in the future as we on boarded other engineers. The number of times I’ve seen production deployments go down due to k8s misconfiguration on other teams has only validated my concerns.

So what you are saying is everything worked? That sounds like k8s did its job.

You aren't meant to fully understand it in a week, anymore than you are expected to fully understand all of sysadmin in a week.

Just because you don't know what every single directive in nginx config does doesn't mean you can't use it effectively and learn what they mean when the time comes.

k8s isn't much different. You don't need to know what a liveliness probe is the first time you use it, you can learn about it as you go (most likely when you run into a badly behaved program that needs forced restarts when it hangs).

Ofcourse if you are running it yourself that is entirely different, you really do need to know how it works to do that but you should be using hosted k8s unless you have hardcore systems folk and actually need that.

You’re right that nginx is also complicated , but seems like we are talking about different alternatives.

The solution I went with, given my limited knowledge of some of these things, was to use elastic beanstalk. You write your flask application, upload the zip and that’s it pretty much. You get a UI to do all the configurations and for the most part nothing there is hard to decipher or google. The only hiccup might be when you’re trying to connect it to RDS and to the external internet but even that is straightforward as long as you follow the right instructions. We run apps that power entire SaaS organizations and this system seems to be more than sufficient. Why complicate further? We have other fish to fry anyway.

If your apps are simple enough to use PaaS then all power to you. :)

I am not a SDE but I did try one weekend to set-up a self managed k8s cluster in the previous company. I did have some previous knowledge of using k8 in GCP. Although when trying to set it up on a completely new cluster outside of GCP, I did run into some issues where I felt I was out of my depth. I think unknowingly I exposed whole of the cluster to the public internet.

On the other hand, with docker swarm, I built a cluster in less than a day. So yeah setting up k8 isn't as trivial as you are making it out to be.

Friends don’t let friends run their own k8s instances. You should use cloud managed deployment and rely on their security services.

For comparison, you can just as easily expose/hide your VM as your managed k8s cluster.