I believe when you say "simulating multi-node setup and addons" - you're seeing it from an operations perspective. Thing is, those concerns don't need to be rep

I believe when you say "simulating multi-node setup and addons" - you're seeing it from an operations perspective. Thing is, those concerns don't need to be repeated for every single application. When a consumer says "test", they mean testing functionality. Not testing operations like network I/O bandwidth, sysctl parameters, rebalancing, etc. The expectation is that, operational folks (kubernetes integration tests, ops integration tests, GKE tests, etc) already have tested and verified all of that. This is not like ops vs dev. When you use a library or framework (say, spring) - you don't test whether HTTP MIME Types are working correctly in spring. You assume the library already has all that tested and covered, and as a consumer, you write tests for what you code. The library's code (and tests) are abstracted from you. This is similar, except for operational stuff. In fact, there is no major difference between them. Its just layering and separation of concerns. There is no such thing as 100% prod except prod. Even for rocket launches. 90+% is good enough for majority of cases, and is already on the higher side.