Here's the thing that irks me about things like "standing up k8s in a couple hours": It's something that only gets done a few times for an entire project - once

Here's the thing that irks me about things like "standing up k8s in a couple hours": It's something that only gets done a few times for an entire project - once or twice in dev and test, then again in prod. Not even a few times a year - a few times per project/code stack. The actual work will be "tweak this to have six side cars instead of five", or "set it to spin up a few more nodes", or maybe even "upgrade k8s from version X to version Y without downtime, test your solution on dev first". There has to be some way to test that. Instead they give you "Bring up a vpc, resources with terraform or cloud formation, spin up k8s, program a webapp that tells me my IP in a container, set up a build system to package it, configure Route 53, then make it all run." - all in three hours. I don't write scripts or even yaml from scratch that fast. I don't know anyone who does. Most people copy/paste old projects or stuff off of StackOverflow and then mangle it to try to do these silly things.