I’m a professional software engineer and I’ve been in the industry since before Kubernetes was first released, and I still found it overwhelming when I had to use it professionally.
I also can’t think of an instance when someone self-hosting would need it. Why did you end up looking into it?
I use Docker Compose for dozens of applications that range in complexity from “just run this service, expose it via my reverse proxy, and add my authentication middleware” to “in this stack, run this service with my custom configuration, a custom service I wrote myself or forked, and another service that I wrote a Dockerfile for; make this service accessible to this other service, but not to the reverse proxy; expose these endpoints to the auth middleware and for these endpoints, allow bypassing of the auth middleware if an API key is supplied.” And I could do much more complicated things with Docker if I needed to, so even for self-hosters with more complex use cases than mine, I question whether Kubernetes is the right fit.
How is that an assumption at all? If you provide the same amount of infrastructure for bikes as for cars, then you still have half the infrastructure for cars, so people can use both / either.
And for those of us living in places where we don’t have bike friendly infrastructure, it’s useful to be able to point out that converting car infra to bike infra would have the capacity to reduce congestion, particularly if the area commits to making those changes more widely.