Kubernetes is hard

If you’ve been hearing a lot about Kubernetes, and maybe read some things about it, or even tried to get started running something in Kubernetes, you may be feeling a little dispirited, confused, overwhelmed, puzzled, and possibly suffering the early symptoms of imposter syndrome. Well, don’t worry: it’s not just you.

Here’s the shocking truth that conference talks, promotional material, corporate press releases, and those other blogs won’t tell you:

Kubernetes is hard.

Of course, everyone who’s enthusiastic about Kubernetes wants to tell you how easy it is. “You can learn Kubernetes in a day!” Well, that would be quite a day. While Kubernetes is powerful and useful, it’s not necessarily so easy to get your head around, especially at first. It involves a lot of puzzling jargon and technical terms which don’t mean much to the newbie:

• Pod
• StatefulSet
• PersistentVolumeClaim
• Custom Resource Definition
• Ingress
• Deployment
• Horizontal Pod Autoscaler

… and so on. If you feel depressed and angry at the amount of new things Kubernetes requires you to learn, then we can absolutely relate to that. We’ve been through some of the same emotions on our Kubernetes journey, which is by no means complete, but the point of this blog is to hammer a few signposts into the swamp to help others feeling similarly lost.