I appreciate the lengthy reply and I sympathise with your concern regarding the cargo culting of technology trends. It's not the first time it happens nor the l

I appreciate the lengthy reply and I sympathise with your concern regarding the cargo culting of technology trends. It's not the first time it happens nor the last. I disagree in general with your view and I think that past few years have brought tremendous innovation in the space: software defined networking, storage, compute; all available to the "hoi polloi", as open source high quality projects that are interoperable with each other and ready to deploy at the push of a button. And you know why this has happened? It's because Kubernetes, with all it's complexity, has become the defacto standard in workload orchestration, and has brought all the large players to the same tables, scrambling to compete on creating the best tools for the ecosystem. I am not naive to think Google didn't strategise on this outcome but the result is a net positive for infrastructure management. I also sense a very machine centric view in your message, and there is a certain beauty in well designed systems like SmartOS and NixOS. But you are missing the point. The container orchestration ecosystem, for all it's faulty underpinnings (Linux, Docker, Kubernetes), is moving to an application centric view that allows the application layer to more intelligently interact with and manipulate the infrastructure it is running on. Taking into consideration the Cambrian explosion in software and the exponential usage of this software (tell me an industry that is not digitising?), this transition is not surprising at all. Regarding the complexity of Kubernetes, some of it is unavoidable, especially considering everything it does and the move from machine centric management to cluster centric management. There are other tools that are operationally simpler (Docker Swarm, Nomad), but they definitely don't offer the same set of features out of the box. By the time you customise Nomad or Swarm to feature parity with Kubernetes you will end up with a similarly looking system, perhaps a bit more well suited for your use case. The good part is that once an abstraction becomes a standard, the layers underneath can be simplified and improved. Just take a look at excellent projects like k3s, Cilium, Linuxkit and you will see that the operational complexity can be reduced, while the platform interface maintained. To summarise, I am very happy that Kubernetes is becoming a standard, and I am convinced that 30-50 years from now we will look at it as we look now at the modernisation of the supply chain which was triggered by the creation of the shipping container.