Recently, 37signals unveiled mrsk, a tool developed internally to ease with deployments of their services and an accompanying blog post which sparked a lengthy discussion on Hacker News.

Is Kubernetes hard?

Many commenters in the HN thread argued that Kubernetes is complex and I think they are partially right.

Part of the complexity lies in it’s versatility, after all, you can run almost any workload on Kubernetes. That versatility means that resources must be composable. In other words, they must be like Lego, when you can join multiple pieces to build something meaningful. Take containers: in Kubernetes you don’t run containers on their own. Kubernetes has a concept of Pods – a group of one or more containers tighly coupled. But even with Pods, you are quite unlikely to run them on their own. You will usually run them via a Deployment, DaemonSet or a StatefulSet. That’s before you’ve even exposed the service to the outside world.

But that’s only part of the story, there’s a whole lot of things running in any production-ready cluster that are not required or needed by Kubernetes at all – you could build a minimal Kubernetes cluster and it would work just fine, but