Using Kubernetes is a love-hate relationship.
Love, because before it, deploying to production was something dark and uncertain. Many tools tried to solve this problem — Mesos, Fleet, Nomad — but only Kubernetes meaningfully solved container orchestration at scale. It's not without merit that today over 96% of organizations using containers run Kubernetes, according to the 2023 CNCF report.
But as nothing is perfect, a piece of software built by Google engineers fell short on design — not UI design, but how things actually work. Engineers think like engineers: it works, but Kubernetes complexity is something you'll likely need a dedicated course to truly understand. On one side it created entire careers — the CKA certification became a market commodity — on the other, small companies that can't afford a certified DevOps engineer find themselves at a crossroads: they feel the need for Kubernetes but can't manage it.
The concrete problem: a minimal Kubernetes cluster requires understanding at least 15 different abstractions — Pods, Deployments, Services, Ingress, ConfigMaps, Secrets, RBAC, PVCs, StorageClasses, NetworkPolicies, and so on. And incredibly, with each release that number grows. Kubernetes 1.29 introduced over 60 API changes. In 2024, more than 10 APIs that projects depended on were deprecated.
