> You’ll need to name names and their particular shortcomings if you’re going to say there are no good PaaS alternatives.
I'm not saying there are no good PaaS alternatives, I'm saying that it's not easy to find the right PaaS alternative. You might think you have the right one, and then some key feature is just missing (in my example, the ability to kick off orchestrator-aware background tasks).
> In particular, both AWS and GCP have cron-as-a-service, which can then be hooked up to AWS Lambda/GCP Functions.
Right, but now you're dealing with cloud-provider primitives which doesn't seem significantly more straightforward than dealing with Kubernetes (instead of knowing Kubernetes, you need to know the cloud provider APIs).
> there are viable alternatives to K8s’ complexity.
I'm sure there are, but figuring out which PaaS is appropriate for your use case (or a combination of PaaS + various cloud provider tools + etc) is a hard problem, possibly just as hard as building on a managed Kubernetes offering.
Personally, I'm hoping someone makes an open-source, push-button Kubernetes distro that has the common stuff built-in: external-dns, cert-manager, ingress-controllers, network storage backends, central logging, prometheus/grafana, etc. This would give you even more of the happy path built in without necessarily coupling you to a cloud provider while also giving you plenty of "future-proofing" (if your pass doesn't have some feature, you often need to switch to another platform, but if your Kubernetes distro doesn't have some feature, you can just build it atop Kubernetes).
I'm not saying there are no good PaaS alternatives, I'm saying that it's not easy to find the right PaaS alternative. You might think you have the right one, and then some key feature is just missing (in my example, the ability to kick off orchestrator-aware background tasks).
> In particular, both AWS and GCP have cron-as-a-service, which can then be hooked up to AWS Lambda/GCP Functions.
Right, but now you're dealing with cloud-provider primitives which doesn't seem significantly more straightforward than dealing with Kubernetes (instead of knowing Kubernetes, you need to know the cloud provider APIs).
> there are viable alternatives to K8s’ complexity.
I'm sure there are, but figuring out which PaaS is appropriate for your use case (or a combination of PaaS + various cloud provider tools + etc) is a hard problem, possibly just as hard as building on a managed Kubernetes offering.
Personally, I'm hoping someone makes an open-source, push-button Kubernetes distro that has the common stuff built-in: external-dns, cert-manager, ingress-controllers, network storage backends, central logging, prometheus/grafana, etc. This would give you even more of the happy path built in without necessarily coupling you to a cloud provider while also giving you plenty of "future-proofing" (if your pass doesn't have some feature, you often need to switch to another platform, but if your Kubernetes distro doesn't have some feature, you can just build it atop Kubernetes).