This is not my experience with k8s at all. Sure, everything will work fine when it works (although I don't think it's as easy as you make it out to be), but when something unexpected happens it's a massive pain to debug.
"8 hours" initial investment is already large for a small/simple scenario; and it's not the full costs either, because fixing problems will be much harder/time-consuming.
I wrote a post about this just the other day[1]:
> What does it mean for a framework, library, or tool to be “easy”? There are many possible definitions one could use, but my definition is usually that it’s easy to debug. I often see people advertise a particular program, framework, library, file format, or something else as easy because “look with how little effort I can do task X, this is so easy!” That’s great, but an incomplete picture.
[..]
> Abstractions which make something easier to write often come at the cost of make things harder to understand. Sometimes this is a good trade-off, but often it’s not. In general I will happily spend a little but more effort writing something now if that makes things easier to understand and debug later on, as it’s often a net time-saver.
[1]: https://arp242.net/weblog/easy.html
"8 hours" initial investment is already large for a small/simple scenario; and it's not the full costs either, because fixing problems will be much harder/time-consuming.
I wrote a post about this just the other day[1]:
> What does it mean for a framework, library, or tool to be “easy”? There are many possible definitions one could use, but my definition is usually that it’s easy to debug. I often see people advertise a particular program, framework, library, file format, or something else as easy because “look with how little effort I can do task X, this is so easy!” That’s great, but an incomplete picture.
[..]
> Abstractions which make something easier to write often come at the cost of make things harder to understand. Sometimes this is a good trade-off, but often it’s not. In general I will happily spend a little but more effort writing something now if that makes things easier to understand and debug later on, as it’s often a net time-saver.
[1]: https://arp242.net/weblog/easy.html