I think the reason why people (correctly) point out that Kubernetes is complicated is because most people do not need a distributed system. People reach for k8s because it's trendy, but in truth a lot of users would be better off with a VM that gets configured with Chef/etc and just runs your software the old fashioned way.
K8s starts to make sense when you want to provide a common platform for a multitude of application developers to work on. Once you can understand it was born from Google's Borg and what problems they were trying to solve with both, the complexity behind it makes a lot more sense.
Most people actually do need a distributed system.
They want their system to be reliable to hardware failures. So when the server inevitably goes down some day, they want their website to continue to work. Very few people wants their website to go down.
They want their system to scale. So when the sudden rise of popularity hits the load balancer, they want their website to continue to work.
In the past, the price to run a distributed system was too high, so most people accepted the downsides of running a simple system.
Nowadays the price to run a distributed system is so low, that it makes little sense to avoid it anymore, for almost any website, if you can afford more than $50/month.
Very well put. I add to that: with an E2E solution, you need to learn things before you deploy your system (still not that you do everything properly), but without that, it's possible to deploy the system, then learn things can go wrong when they actually happen. Now if you ask someone who has a half baked distributed system, they still don't know all the failure modes of their system. I've seen this in mission-critical systems.
But in a company that had properly reliable infrastructure, any system that moved to the new infra based on K8s needed much less maintenance, had much more standardized DevOps (which allowed people from other teams to chime in when needed), and had much fewer mistakes. There was no disagreement that K8s stramlined everything.
I really want NixOS to succeed in becoming easy to configure, operate and onboard. I would like to avoid any other configuration management tool in my life again. In this way, you can have simple vm's and k8s for distributed use cases. Both that can be declared in code.
