I can see your point for small hobby projects. But enterprise web development in C++ is no fun at all. For example: "Google says that about 70% of all serious security bugs in the Chrome codebase are related to memory management and safety." https://www.zdnet.com/article/chrome-70-of-all-security-bugs...

Developer time for fixing these bugs is in most cases more expensive, than to throw more hardware at your software written in a garbage collected language.

> because it is not being used by well-known tech company and not being worked on by large numbers of people, it would not be newsworthy.

And at this point the hobbyist might wonder, "why isn't my toaster software being used by well-known companies? where are the pull requests to add compatibility for newer toaster models?"

> As a spectator, not a tech worker who uses these popular solutions, I would say there seems to be a great affinity amongst in the tech industry for anything that is (relatively) complex.

I think you have it backwards. General/abstract solutions (like running arbitrary software with a high tolerance for failure) have broad appeal because they address a broad problem. Finding general solutions to broad problems yields complexity, but also great value.

> great affinity [...] for anything that is (relatively) complex.

That, and mixture of a sunken cost fallacy/lack of the ability to step back and review if the chosen solution is really better/simpler rather than a hell of accidental complexity. If you've spend countless months to grok k8s and sell it to your customer/boss, it just has to be good, doesn't it?

Plus, there's a great desire to go for an utopian future cleaning up all that's wrong with current tech. This was the case with Java in the 2000s, and is the case with Rust (and to a lesser degree with WASM) today, and k8s. Starting over is easier and more fun than fixing your shit.

And another factor are the deep pockets of cloud providers who bombard us with k8s stories, plus devs with an investment into k8s and/or Stockholm syndrome. Same story with webdevs longing for nuclear weapons a la React for relatively simple sites to make them attractive on the job market, until the bubble collapses.

But like with all generational phenomenae, the next wave of devs will tear down daddy-o's shit and rediscover simple tools and deploys without gobs of yaml.

I think the popularity of Kubernetes is that it can run all kinds of workloads on a single platform not really its performance. I've been in Ops business for over a decade now, in my case every single customer has a completely different kind of application architecture and sometimes even with similar use cases (i.e like ecom app or chatbots etc). With Kubernetes the differences are largely irrelevant encapsulated nicely within the container. This means in my universe I can run all of our customers on a single architecture and the differences are nicely abstracted.

Same feeling here but I came to understand that it's the enterprise and the design by committee that brings in the complexity.

K8S is developed by a multitude of very large companies. Each with their own agenta/needs. All of them have to be addressed. Thus the complexity. If you think about it they probably manage to keep the complexity to relatively low levels. Maybe because it is pushed to the rest of the ecosystem (see service meshes for example).

Being pushed by the behemoths also explains the popularity. Smaller companies and workers feel that this is a safe investment in terms of money and time familiarizing with the tech stack so they jump on. And the loop goes on.

Main business reason for all that though I think it's the need of Google et all to compete with AWS creating a cloud platform that comes to be a standard and belongs to no-one really. In this sense it is a much better, versatile and open ended openstack attempt.

That's kind of why people use Google Go. No memory issues, statically linked, easy cross-compile, and it can handle 10k requests on a toaster.

And yes, there is less fancy companies like one where I work where we don't use Kubernetes because it's kind of overkill if all of your production workload fits onto 2 beefy bare metal servers.

I can see a point in using Docker to unify development and production environments into one immutable image. But I have yet to see a normal-sized company that gets a benefit from spreading out to hundreds of micro instances on a cloud and then coordinating that mess with Kubernetes. Of course, it'll be great if you're a unicorn, but most people using it are planning for way more scaling than what they'll realistically need and are, thus, overselling themselves on cloud costs.

> I would say there seems to be a great affinity amongst in the tech industry for anything that is (relatively) complex.

hah, i've noticed that too - specifically around k8s/deployments/system architecture too. i've taken to calling it complexity fetishisation.

i think it stems from the belief/hope that, whilst they don't "google sized" data today, they need to allow for it.

i'll take two toasters, please.

Deploy that toaster on k8s and now you have a vc funded startup.