Where some people collide, and disagree about complexity depends on their roles. If you're a consumer, then yes, it's as complex as you make it. If you keep it

Where some people collide, and disagree about complexity depends on their roles. If you're a consumer, then yes, it's as complex as you make it. If you keep it super simple you may lose out on some features, but that a reasonable trade-off. If you're the person responsible for running and maintaining the Kubernetes cluster, then you're kinda out of luck. It honestly not that bad to install, you can do that in an afternoon. Where I find Kubernetes to be exceedingly complex is in debug-ability. I'm not sure there's anyway around that, it's basically a software defined datacenter, with all the complexity that brings... For some of us it's a software defined datacenter, on top of an actual datacenter, just to make things worse. When I read about a company that just spin up a new Kubernetes cluster, because it's quicker than debugging the existing one, then I get concerned. For running payload, absolutely, just use the subset of the features you're comfortable with and build from there. Still I'd argue that most of us will never have problems large enough or complex enough that Kubernetes is a hard requirement.