IMO the big win with Kubernetes is helm or operators. If you're going to pay the complexity costs you might as well get the wins which is essentially a huge 'a

IMO the big win with Kubernetes is helm or operators. If you're going to pay the complexity costs you might as well get the wins which is essentially a huge 'app-store' of popular infrastructure components and an entirely programmatic way to manage your operations (deployments, updates, fail-overs, backups, etc). For example if you want to setup something complex like Ceph - Rook is a really nice way to do that. It's a very leaky abstraction so you aren't hiding all the complexity of Ceph but the declarative interface is generally a much nicer way to manage Ceph than a boatload of ansible scripts or generally what we had before. The key to understand is that helm or operators don't magically make infrastructure a managed 'turn-key' appliances, you do generally need to understand how the thing works.