There are for sure a few concepts you need to learn with k8s, however I wonder if it would be much shorter if you did a guide like this for manually done / bash script powered / ansible deployments
That's one of the strengths with K8s, at least there is documentation, unlike a 1000 line perl script with no tests which does service discovery.
I fully agree on that being a major strength of k8s. Looking at the resource manifests gives a ton of insight into how a system is supposed to function.
I went through your problem before on a practice cluster and ended up giving up on that one.
Realistically the hard way doesn't actually explain much of the commands you're running, and much of it covers the tedium of getting the many many certs you need to bootstrap everything (which will then expire and not rotate automatically). It's much better to just use kubeadm, and take some time to read all the args to kubelet, kubeadm, kubeproxy, etc...
Sure but I am not comparing it against manually done / bash script powered / Ansible deployments. Even if I was the CI/CD pipeline would capture many of the problems early and than I have an immutable AMI with autoscaling groups that is very easy to debug, networking setup is super simple and load-balancing is also straightforward to troubleshoot. Cramming all of these into a simple project that is not as easy to debug is not worth the effort for us.