Joey D’Antoni defends the defensible:
I’ve seen a couple of posts (of course they were chock full of AI slop images) on LinkedIn in the last couple of weeks, talking about how challenging it is to implement Kubernetes. In the most recent post I saw, it stated that “it took 5 months for our CEO to implement Kubernetes for our app”, to which I would ask, why the hell is your CEO configuring your clusters. I designed, and implemented the Kubernetes infrastructure on my current project, and I’ve worked on for a while, so of course, I felt the need to share my opinions on the matter.
As far as Kubernetes on-premises goes, there are quite valid reasons to run it on-prem. Yeah, it’s easier to host in AKS or EKS, but that’s not always possible. But regardless of whether you’re hosting on-prem or in a cloud provider, Kubernetes requires solid knowledge across several areas, including networking, storage administration, systems administration, and CI/CD, not to mention the development skills needed for containerization.
I think Joey downplays the skill level required, but I don’t want to err in the opposite direction by overstating the challenge. But if you want anything beyond the bog-standard deployment of AKS/EKS, the “You must be this tall to ride the ride” sign is significantly higher than using other containerized solutions like Azure Application Services/Container Apps or Elastic Container Service.