Yes, time and complexity.

Managing a switch and servers is a piece of cake compared to managing k8s, IMO.

Depends on how much abstraction you have, I have seen big companies where deploying code is basically like using Heroku. As an engineer responsible for a couple of services you don't need to know or care if this code is running on bare metal, Mesos, K8s and you care even less about the data center.

I come from this old world of managing switches and servers and today we definitely need a lot less people to run code in production. I used to work at a company with ~2000 machines in physical data centers before containerization, this required a huge infra team - I'm sure that today I could support the same workloads with half the team.

When I was a sysadmin it was definitely harder.

Devops gives the benefit of cows instead of pets, and a ton of reusable work. So I get why it's more 'valuable' from a remuneration basis.

Pets aren't that bad if your pets are a few elephants.

Yeah but how often are they elephants, and how often are they cattle that have just been neglected for 15 years?

>seems like managing k8s is an order of time expenditure greater than managing an old-school F5...

or Nagios...