Well, some thoughts in no particular order: 0. YAML everywhere. Augh. 1. Vanilla kubernetes by itself doesn't really do much; everyone basically assumes you'l

Well, some thoughts in no particular order: 0. YAML everywhere. Augh. 1. Vanilla kubernetes by itself doesn't really do much; everyone basically assumes you'll use a cluster in a cloud somewhere that comes with all kinds of add-ons and functionality on top of the default. If you want to run an on-premises cluster, once you start adding external components to a Kubernetes cluster to make it actually useful, it starts getting complicated. 2. I don't think configuration management of the resources you do put in a cluster is a fully solved problem, especially if you depend on CRDs. 3. kubectl being context-sensitive is rather annoying. You basically can't share a kubeconfig between two terminal sessions without severe danger of footgunning. 4. If you just use Helm packages with defaults, you'll end up running software with very collision-prone UIDs and security contexts, so two separate components that you deploy can end up running as the same user on a host. I don't think that's good security design, but the system doesn't encourage you to do the correct thing. 5. All the "easy" tooling is basically just "run this magic incantation and it will do things for you". The culture around how things are done seem to encourage ignorance about what you're actually deploying. Many operations also modify cluster state and thus should be managed and not done willy-nilly, but that's also ignored by default. See also #2 Kubernetes has its upsides (something like ArgoCD is very nice to use when set up properly) but I guess my main beef with it is that it can make things look easy that actually aren't, and mislead its users.