The objective is to minimize how much devs need to know. There are a couple of ways to do that. The first is to pull out the traditional ops skill set into a traditional ops team so the app devs throw code over the fence to the ops team to operate, and hilarity ensues because the ops team is measured on uptime but they can’t affect the first order causes of downtime (code issues), so instead they try to make it harder to ship changes frequently which slows the business.

The other solution is that devs operate the apps themselves. This is infeasible with a traditional VM setup because managing VMs effectively involves tons of specialist knowledge and it’s unreasonable to expect dev teams to master it while also being expert developers.

Enter Kubernetes. Now you have a core DevOps/SRE team managing the “platform” (the Kubernetes cluster and various add-ons such as operators) which gives the application developers a high-level interface for operating their applications. They need to know a bit of Kubernetes, but it’s a whole lot less than mastering the traditional VM-based ops skill set. Moreover, as the Kubernetes ecosystem continues to mature, the surface area with which developers interact becomes smaller.