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Comment by Wherecombinator | Hacker News Reader

As a junior engineer (only working 6 months), the K8s side of things has been my biggest barrier for learning. On top of having to learn about software engineering practices, I’ve had to learn helm files, deployments, services etc. It was/is very overwhelming. I know I’m new and naive but it seems needlessly complicated and it’ll be another few rounds of abstraction beyond K8s before people are happy with it.

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Welcome to software development. Expect it to be like this forever and continue to get worse. Tech seems to have 5 year cycles in which a problem has gotten enough peoples nerves over the previous 5 years that a new abstraction comes out to solve it which people then adopt and develop a love/hate relationship with over the next 5 years and wind up either inventing or adopting the next abstraction to deal with the current frustrations.

It's not all bad. In my 8 years in the industry there has been an incredible shift in what a single person and/or small teams are capable of versus the status quo at the time. It comes at what I can only describe as a Schrodinger Cost - i.e a cost that is sometimes worth it and sometimes not.

It's important to separate out microservices and kubernetes. They aren't the same thing, and Kubernetes isn't the only way to run microservices. Tons of companies were running microservices prior to kubernetes ever launching.

The core idea is that services communicating via an API that have self-contained infrastructure is easier in a large organization, easier to scale, and allows you to make the right technical decisions for the problem.

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