The full-time job of keeping up with Kubernetes

I dunno, if it's an ad for GKE, then "you typically have only about nine months until the latest version goes out of support" is indeed pretty persuasive marketing to me to let someone else deal with it.

That's not lock-in, it's just a dependency.

It would be lock-in if the vendor made it unreasonably difficult to remove the dependency.

The short story version of this was written by Arthur C Clarke in 1951, "Superiority" http://www.mayofamily.com/RLM/txt_Clarke_Superiority.html

Joel Spolsky talks about this (as a somewhat adversarial tactic, even if it's not purposely so) in "Fire and Motion"[1]

"Watch out when your competition fires at you. Do they just want to force you to keep busy reacting to their volleys, so you can’t move forward?

Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP. The companies who stumble are the ones who spend too much time reading tea leaves to figure out the future direction of Microsoft. People get worried about .NET and decide to rewrite their whole architecture for .NET because they think they have to. Microsoft is shooting at you, and it’s just cover fire so that they can move forward and you can’t, because this is how the game is played, Bubby. Are you going to support Hailstorm? SOAP? RDF? Are you supporting it because your customers need it, or because someone is firing at you and you feel like you have to respond? The sales teams of the big companies understand cover fire. They go into their customers and say, “OK, you don’t have to buy from us. Buy from the best vendor. But make sure that you get a product that supports (XML / SOAP / CDE / J2EE) because otherwise you’ll be Locked In The Trunk.” Then when the little companies try to sell into that account, all they hear is obedient CTOs parrotting “Do you have J2EE?” And they have to waste all their time building in J2EE even if it doesn’t really make any sales, and gives them no opportunity to distinguish themselves. It’s a checkbox feature — you do it because you need the checkbox saying you have it, but nobody will use it or needs it. And it’s cover fire.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

A description of -- not a name for -- is corporate control of an open source project. Trying to keep up with Angular or Kubernetes or Go is not a problem at the Google from whence they come because the technologies are primarily used by and hence primarily designed for use by teams. Not individual developers.

A team's brain can schedule a time where part of it is training or studying while the rest of it is making progress on the task at hand. A team's brain can resolve ambiguity and complexity more easily because it has multiple human brains and those brains have different strengths and experiences.

A single developer can't duplicate a brain. A small team of developers can't replicate the larger multi-team brain of a Google org-chart. Google org-charts are the context for which its tools are designed. The same is true of other corporate open source technology bundles like React and AWS.

People kick themselves for not grokking technologies like Kuberentes without realizing that it wasn't really designed for their use case, isn't documented to be easy to pick up, and isn't managed with the cognitive load of individuals in mind. The time scales around which these technologies are designed are FTE-months or years.

If a two pizza team can get up to speed in a month, it means an individual will probably take about a year. Given equal cognitive efficiency.