[MrUnderhill]

I'm not very familiar with Kubernetes, but from what I've seen, to me it looks quite complicated. I'm wondering, when people say they use Kubernetes and consider it easy/simple, does that typically include operating the underlying Kubernetes container infrastructure as well? Or does "using Kubernetes" usually mean deploying containers to someone else's Kubernetes hosting (like Google)?

[mpmpmpmp]

When I say it (and I would guess outside of people who either contribute to Kubernetes or are using it to build their own PaaS) I mean a managed service like GKE. When I attempted to set my own cluster up all the confusion was around all of the choices to make, what container networking stack, etcd, and so on. GKE gives you an easy button for simpler architectures where you just have some containers and you want them to go in a cluster.

[vorpalhex]

You will probably use someone's recommended Kubernetes stack, like k3s. It doesn't make a ton of difference in practice whether you let someone else host your control plane or do it on your own hardware, but your actual nodes you probably want instance level control on.

Over time you'll probably grow your own customizations and go-tos on kubernetes that you layer on top of k3s or what have you.