I used to feel like docker wasn't worth the complexity but I've come around. It strikes a pretty dang good balance. Is kubernetes worth learning if you don't use microservices at work?
Running a Kubernetes cluster, in a shared environment (e.g. not just a hobbyist or single-purpose cluster), is much more involved. I'd never say developing a skill isn't worth it, but it is a deep subject with lots of unintuitive and frustrating corners, and you won't pick it up in a day or without scars. There's a reason lots of small- and medium-sized business just write a check to their cloud provider.
Do you have any examples of a corner that might give you a scar? I’ve heard this a lot but haven’t experienced it myself.
I’ve spent a number of years working primarily with cloud foundry. Started working with k8s in the past year and I’ve mostly found it straight forward. But I’m far from an expert yet.
For work, having minikube + skaffold is perfect for local dev of complex apps. And it's easy to use production deployment manifests with it. It's also easy to use Kind for running integration and e2e tests. The ecosystem is second to none.
If you're curious about orchestration concepts in general, something like nomad is a nice way to wade into the pool rather than the whirlpool of obscenity that is k8s.
After spending a day with Nomad, I feel I fully understand how this could get nightmarishly complicated in a Kubernetes way, and what that would look like, and why someone would want that in some situations. All the understanding without pointless but exacting detours.
Orchestration is more complex, but not too bad if you are using a managed platform.
A few days and you can get your head around it enough to get started with huge payback in efficiency.
After that, you can spend years really going deep on K8s and fully containerised stacks, but that’s more for DevOps/Cloud engineers rather than Devs.
Maybe. K8s makes orchestration better. (If you disagree look at the last time marathon/mesos/dcos released and propose a better replacement.) Do you need container orchestration? That's a much better question. If you do, reach for k8s, if you don't, don't.
At one point or another someone will say something about K8s, and it never hurts to know more than just the peachy marketing posters from the large cloud providers, so you can have an opinion. What it realistically can and cannot do for you - this kind of stuff.