I have no idea how to deploy my app on Google App Engine or Heroku. So instead of spending time developing features my customers care about, I'll spend time learning how to deploy my app on those services.
This is true for any way of deploying, & depends on what your already know versus what you need to learn about. But different deployment approaches require you understanding different things, or different volumes of stuff.
There's also the difference between what you need to know to get started vs what you need to know to run a service reliably.
If you deploy to a platform that uses thing X for your app in production, and thing X has unhelpful defaults or will behave poorly in some situation and cause or amplify an outage, then not only do you need to learn the minimum about how to deploy, but to also learn about the pitfalls and what you need to do to overcome or mitigate them -- either proactively or reactively when production breaks and you don't understand why & don't understand how to fix it.
The amount of latter stuff you need to learn to have a reliable production system that you're able to maintain in a more complicated configurable deployment system is going to be much larger even if it happens to be quick & easy for you to get started.
> This is true for any way of deploying, & depends on what your already know versus what you need to learn about.
The difference is that Kubernetes is portable from cloud to cloud. Also, when you invest in learning Kubernetes your knowledge is both portable and durable. This fact made a huge difference for me, because I am not a backend dev, so I am not willing to invest time in learning something unless my the knowledge I acquire is both portable and durable.
> Also, when you invest in learning Kubernetes your knowledge is both portable and durable.
this may be true, let's check back in 10 years to validate the durability!
e.g. to give a non-tech counterpoint: I'm currently working on some logic to fit statistical models to data. The foundations of much of this knowledge is hundreds or thousands of years old (e.g. algebra, calculus, statistics). Orders of magnitude more durable than any knowledge related to the particular tech stack I am using.
