Comment by stasge

The problem is not Kubernetes but how it's treated. From its inception I've been seeing two anti-patterns: treating it as a platform (and being frustrated for Kubernetes not meeting expectations) and treating it as a product or part of a product (investing heavily into its customization and making it a dependency). Neither is practical unless you are building a platform and it is your product. Otherwise it should be viewed as an OS and treated as a commodity. You create a single big VM with MicroK8s per project (zero-ops vanilla Kubernetes) and make no dependency on how exactly Kubernetes is setup. This way you can run the same setup locally and in a data center. If ever needed your app could be moved to any cloud as long as that cloud meets basic prerequisites (like presence of persistent storage or load balancer). The best part is Kubernetes (unlike traditional OS) is API driven and your apps could be nicely packaged and managed using Terraform/OpenTofu or similar tooling.