I agree with the point that production is hard. There's so many things you just don't think about as a developer that end up being important. Log storage, certificate renewal, etc.
I think how "hard" kubernetes is depends on how deep you go. If you're building a cluster from scratch, on your own hardware, setting up the control plane yourself etc. it's very very hard. On the other hand, if you're using a hosted service like EKS and you can hand off the hardware and control plane management to someone else, IMO it's actually very easy to use; I actually find it a lot easier than working with the constellation of services amazon has to offer for instance.
I do think there are parts of it where "best practices" are still being worked out though, like managing YAML files. There's also definitely some rough edges. Like, Helm charts are great... to use. They're an absolute nightmare to write, and there's all sorts of delightful corner cases like not being able to reliably upgrade things that use StatefulSet (last I used anyway). It's not perfect, but honestly if you learn the core concepts and use a hosted service you can get a lot out of it.
I think how "hard" kubernetes is depends on how deep you go. If you're building a cluster from scratch, on your own hardware, setting up the control plane yourself etc. it's very very hard. On the other hand, if you're using a hosted service like EKS and you can hand off the hardware and control plane management to someone else, IMO it's actually very easy to use; I actually find it a lot easier than working with the constellation of services amazon has to offer for instance.
I do think there are parts of it where "best practices" are still being worked out though, like managing YAML files. There's also definitely some rough edges. Like, Helm charts are great... to use. They're an absolute nightmare to write, and there's all sorts of delightful corner cases like not being able to reliably upgrade things that use StatefulSet (last I used anyway). It's not perfect, but honestly if you learn the core concepts and use a hosted service you can get a lot out of it.