Last I checked k8s required you to have swap disabled and some cgroups settings configured. As I recall, installing Kubernetes was quite difficult, and having something that's ready to go sounds great.
Installing Kubernetes has gotten easier since the time you last looked at it then. Having used Kubeadm and then RKE from Rancher, I can get a 3 node (non-HA) cluster up in under 10 minutes. This is on regular RHEL 7.4 machines when I last did this in a non-automated way.
I build and maintain large-scale Kubernetes infrastructure for a living the way I put it is: easy to setup, somewhat more challenging to maintain.
It's not rocket science, but like any complex computing tool it requires dedicated attention especially if you are going to run more than a handful of clusters. A lot of the tooling in the ecosystem falls flat here, it all solves the Day One: Getting Started problem but often punts on Day 2: Operations and then once it realizes it is actually a problem hamfistedly engineers a bolt-on solution.
So back to my point: Provisioning and setup easy... maintenance moderately more complex.
Agree 100%. Part of the value add we feel we bring is going to be an OS that keeps pace with Kubernetes. Also, automated upgrades. Making the maintenance of a cluster a little easier over time.
At it's simplest, just a couple of flags (--upload-certs from the init node, and --control-plane from the joining masters).
It gets a bit more complicated when you automate it and support adding/replacing nodes - the uploaded certs are valid only for 2h for example. (IMO the easiest solution to that is manual cert distribution - i.e. just scping them to the joining nodes.)
