Pretty sure if there was a simple alternative, people would hate it.

Everyone initially wants thing A. But then they want to customize it to do all permutations and combinations n of A, B, C. They want it to be extensible. They want redundancy. They want orchestration. They want integration.

It’s why practically every config file format eventually becomes its own scripting language. Even HTML started off simple — now ridiculously complex — all the more ironic since practically nobody writes it by hand. Instead of CSS simplifying it, it became more complex.

There is another thing that is extremely customizable and extensible. It’s called a programming language. People write programs to solve specific problems.

There seems to be a perverse trend of cobbling together a Byzantine mesh of libraries, plugins, and services with complex configuration files to make it do practically everything possible. We just used to write software for such purposes…

And for anyone who thinks HTML is simple… the A (anchor) tag has an “ping” attribute that results in POST requests to a list of URLs when a link is clicked ! The list of attributes and resulting variations in behavior is quite mind boggling. It was supposed to be a damn link! https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/links.html

See: https://www.macchaffee.com/blog/2024/you-have-built-a-kubern...

I don't think you can provide all the features of Kubernetes while reducing the complexity. What is possible is to support a subset of the features of Kubernetes while making it easy to use.

https://github.com/openrundev/openrun is a project I am building. It supports declarative deployments, on a single-node with Docker or onto Kubernetes. The target use cases is limited to standalone web app, like internal tools. No support for stateful services, you manage stateful services yourself. With that simplification, OpenRun provides a much easier developer experience.

Totally agree with you. K8s ends up being the simplest solution for a very complex problem