Comment by jrs95

The complexity of Kubernetes largely reflects the complexity of the problem. Nobody has delivered anything significantly simpler that hasn’t had a much smaller scope, and those tools approach the same level of complexity when composed with others to get the same level of functionality. But setting up Kubernetes is both well documented and automated on multiple cloud providers, whereas something like Nomad & Consul doesn’t really have a good end to end walk through to get you to the same destination as Kubernetes. I suppose if you’re fine with pushing that complexity into service clients you can avoid the need for a lot beyond what Nomad and Consul give you by themselves — but then you end up with the downsides that something like the Netflix microservices stack gets you. Fat clients ultimately leave the developer with more complexity, and Kubernetes helps you eliminate that in favor of more SRE/Ops/whatever-you’d-like-to-call-it complexity. Since cloud platforms can take a lot of the edge off of Ops complexity, that’s my preferred approach.