Ask anyone who has already built their Kubernetes platform what it was like, and they’ll likely say it’s not that bad. In hindsight, they’re right. Once you’ve figured out which tools to use, how to glue them together, and how to monitor, patch, secure, deploy, and scale everything, the process becomes familiar. Some even start calling it easy, at least compared to where they began.
But that’s hindsight bias in full force. For everyone else (the teams who haven’t yet crossed the CNCF gauntlet), it’s a very different experience.
The truth is, Kubernetes itself isn’t complex in the way people often describe it. But it does start at a higher level of operational difficulty than most technologies. Before you even get to platform decisions, you’re already deep into unfamiliar territory. You have to learn new paradigms like declarative infrastructure, control loops, ephemeral workloads, role-based access, persistent volume claims, and network policies. This is not a shallow pool. The learning curve is steep, and everything that comes after is made harder because of it.
And what comes next? A series of decisions that no one tells you are going to define your platform’s destiny. Kubernetes doesn’t come with batteries included. It is not a packaged product. You adopt the core, and then you assemble your operating environment from a catalogue of CNCF projects. Some are brilliant. Some are fragile. Some are popular but overshoot the needs of most real-world use cases. You pick and choose, and in doing so, you either pave a path toward simplicity or bury yourself under layers of accidental complexity.
The worst part is not that this is hard. The worst part is that it’s easy to get it wrong. A powerful tool might look good on paper but overwhelm your team when things break. A lightweight tool might be simple but leave you needing workarounds later. Every decision has trade-offs, and those trade-offs aren’t always clear until six, twelve, or even eighteen months down the track, when reversing them is painful.
This isn’t just a technical puzzle. It’s also a human one. These choices are debated in Slack, argued over in team meetings, pushed by vendors, and second-guessed by architects. No decision lives in isolation. The more cooks in the kitchen, the harder it gets to stay aligned. And that’s before you even factor in team turnover or that one engineer who knew how everything worked but just left.
So no, Kubernetes isn’t complex by design. But it is hard to turn into something that works reliably, operates smoothly, and can be understood and maintained by the people you actually have on the team. Especially when most of those people didn’t sign up to be platform engineers.
That’s why we built Portainer.
Not to dumb things down. Not to hide the power of Kubernetes. But to reduce the operational burden of getting from zero to usable. Portainer helps you build and manage your Kubernetes (and Docker!) platform in a way that respects your time, your team’s skill level, and your actual production needs.
We’ve lived this process. We know what it feels like to spend months building infrastructure when all you wanted was a stable place to run your apps. We’ve seen teams get bogged down in tooling decisions and lose momentum. That’s what we’re trying to fix.
Kubernetes is powerful, but only if your team can operate it with confidence. Our job is to help make that possible.