The allure of declarative approaches to complex problem solving has finally been worn down to nothing for me and Kubernetes was the last straw, nearly 10 years ago.

The mental gymnastics required to express oneself in yaml, rather than, say, literally anything else, invariably generates a horror show of extremely verbose boilerplate, duplication, bloat, delays and pain.

If you're not Google, please for the love of god, please consider just launching a monolith and database on a Linux box (or two) in the corner and see how beautifully simple life can be.

They'll hum along quietly serving many thousands of actual customers and likely cost less to purchase than a single month (or at worst, quarter) of today's cloud-based muggings.

When you pay, you'll pay for bandwidth and that's real value that also happens to make your work environment more efficient.

If you're not Google, please for the love of god, please consider just launching a monolith and database on a Linux box (or two) in the corner and see how beautifully simple life can be.

You can literally get a Linux box (or two) in the corner and run:

  curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | sh -
  cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
  ...(json/yaml here)
  EOF

The mental gymnastics required to express oneself in yaml, rather than, say, literally anything else

Like, brainfuck? Like bash? Like Terraform HCL puppet chef ansible pile-o-scripts? The effort required to output your desired infrastructure's definition as JSON shouldn't really be that gargantuan. You express yourself in anything else but it can't be dumped to JSON?