I have Kubernetes in Action on my desk and I haven’t cracked it open yet because Kubernetes seems monstrously complex. Sure helm gets you up and running. When something goes wrong in prod at 3am, what do you do?
K8s is actually fairly simple and self-evident once you understand about 3 core ideas: etcd being the repository of state, in particular the spec; controllers with control loops bringing status into line with spec (the core mechanism in k8s, this is key); and a familiarity with the options on pods & deployments, for initialisation, service discovery, liveness, readiness, etc. that let the system make decisions globally while you only worry about local status (this is most of what you need to know as a dev deploying a service).
Don't buy the FUD. There's a lot of it about. K8s commoditises cloud providers. It's a strategic weapon against AWS lock-in.
This is my issue as well. I'm not comfortable running magic commands that create vast realms of infrastructure that I am responsible for but do not understand. It's one thing if it's all going to run on someone else's Kube, but even still, I need to be able to troubleshoot the apps on top, which are my responsibility.
