Title: Kubernetes Complexity Fatigue and the Quest for Simplicity

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February 22, 2021 was just another day at the office. Or maybe it wasn’t. The world was still reeling from the pandemic, and remote work had become the norm. In tech circles, platform engineering was becoming a formalized role, and SREs were increasingly recognized as vital to keeping the digital house in order.

But for me, one thing stood out like a sore thumb: Kubernetes. It felt like everyone around me was dealing with the growing pains of managing their clusters. Workflows became complex, and the overhead of maintaining all those YAML files started to eat away at our productivity. I had seen too many arguments over which version of a tool to use or how to structure a deployment.

One day, I found myself thinking about how we could make Kubernetes simpler. Not just for ourselves but for the developers who were building applications on top of it. The thought was gnawing at me: what if there was an easier way?

Then, in the Hacker News thread about Redbean—a single-file distributable web server—I saw a glimmer of hope. It wasn’t Kubernetes, but it resonated with something I had been wrestling with for months. What if we could have that kind of simplicity, but for our containerized workloads? Could we distill all the complexity down to just what was essential?

I started brainstorming. What if we built a lightweight wrapper around kubectl and helm, streamlining the command line interactions? Or maybe we could create some custom tools that abstracted away some of the more complex bits. The idea took shape in my mind: a simplified Kubernetes experience for our team.

But as with most ideas, there were hurdles. We had existing applications that relied on intricate deployment workflows. Rewriting everything to fit into this new framework would be non-trivial. Plus, we’d have to convince everyone—especially the ones who had spent countless hours fighting Kubernetes—to give up their hard-won configurations and adopt something simpler.

I decided to start small. I built a tiny utility that wrapped around kubectl and added some custom flags for common operations. The goal was to make things easier without removing too much power from our developers’ hands. It wasn’t perfect, but it felt like progress.

Over the next few weeks, I iterated on this idea. I reached out to my colleagues, shared what I had built, and listened to their feedback. Some were enthusiastic, others skeptical. But there was one thing that became clear: we needed a simpler way to manage our Kubernetes clusters.

As I wrote more code and refined the tool, I began to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The complexity didn’t go away entirely, but it was starting to feel more manageable. We had a framework for making decisions about how to structure deployments, and a set of tools that could help us do so more easily.

On February 22, as I typed out commit messages and pushed code to our internal Git repository, I felt a sense of pride. We were taking steps towards a simpler future. It wasn’t going to be easy, but maybe—just maybe—Kubernetes didn’t have to be the monolith it seemed.

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This blog entry is based on my own experiences with Kubernetes complexity and the desire for simplicity in our platform engineering work. The specific tool I mention (Redbean) was used as an inspiration but not directly referenced; rather, it symbolizes the broader idea of finding simpler solutions amidst complex systems.