Having struggled with setting up kubernetes over the last month on my own, I’ve come to realize the absolute value of simplicity.

In the end Helm just introduced more problems than it solved. Rather than applying configs haphazardly and relying on 3rd party services, it was ultimately much simpler to just download the configs for whatever service was needed (nginx ingress controller for me) and committing them to source control.

My biggest take away from the k8s community is that lots of people write terrible documentation and other people write blog posts and SO answers without actually understanding how kubernetes works under the hood.

There is still an ocean of depth in regards to k8s I don’t know yet, but I feel a lot stronger about getting the intermediate basics. I’m at a point where I’m being productive again.