The core idea isn’t pods. The core idea is reconciliation loops: you have some desired state - a picture of how you’d like a resource to look or be - and little controller loops that indefinitely compare that to the world, and update the world.
Much of the complexity then comes from the enormous amount of resource types - including all the custom ones. But the basic idea is really pretty small.
I find terraform much more confusing - there’s a spec, and the real world.. and then an opaque blob of something I don’t understand that terraform sticks in S3 or your file system and then.. presumably something similar to a one-shot reconciler that wires that all together each time you plan and apply?
Much of the complexity then comes from the enormous amount of resource types - including all the custom ones. But the basic idea is really pretty small.
I find terraform much more confusing - there’s a spec, and the real world.. and then an opaque blob of something I don’t understand that terraform sticks in S3 or your file system and then.. presumably something similar to a one-shot reconciler that wires that all together each time you plan and apply?