HN tends to follow tech hype cycles, Kubernetes is entering the “trough of disillusionment” now that people are starting to use it in anger. This reminds me of prior fights like Solaris vs Linux. Kubernetes is not that bad, its actually quite elegant in many ways. It’s just that it is tackling a hard problem in the hardest way possible: by providing a new set of bottom up abstractions to replace traditional virtual machines, config management, and network and storage virtualization in the image of the Google model of massive scale workload scheduling. That means it is a whole new world to learn but you can’t quite forget about the old world yet, and need to map between the two. Is it complicated? Yeah, mainly because it’s evolving so fast and serving many audiences. It will get easier.

Simpler alternatives? Any PaaS like Heroku or Google App Engine or Cloud Foundry.

Or a serverless function platform like AWS lambda (not sure if it’s “simpler” but it is getting there)

Disclaimer I work for Pivotal who sells cloud foundry and a distro of Kubernetes

In addition to those mentioned, for on-prem or self-controlled container clusters, it could be worth looking at Docker swarm.

It has a lot fewer features than Kubernetes, however it's also a lot simpler to get up and running with.

I get the sense that the naysayers outweight the supporters, simply because the headline alone is not news. Don't let them deter you, spend a few hours and decide for yourself.

AWS ECS deployed by well written Cloudformation templates and ECR as container repository