Apologies in advance this turned in to a bit of a rant of violent agreement.

For most places k8s is a complete boat anchor. Ends up being a huge complication and sap on product momentum. Can’t tell you how many outages I’ve seen from k8s misconfiguration and misunderstanding.

In no world would I consider k8s to be boring, I can’t understand how all of these shops have convinced themselves that k8s specifically is the level of abstraction at which they want to be interacting with their infrastructure.

I think k8s happens because a large number of devs look at Heroku-like platforms and bristle at the notion that they could ever be expected to intentionally constrain their brilliant system designs into preexisting, Heroku-style shapes. It’s ego on some level.

That, and a ton engineers are still incredibly bad at trading off hardware cost and compensation/complexity/organizational cost. “Heroku will cost us $2000/month, running k8s on our own hardware will only cost $400/month.” Ok, but your team’s total comp is costing the company on the order of $1MM/year. Is saving $1,600/month on infrastructure to spend $20k/month on dev time a good deal? This happens all the freaking time, it’s crazy how little devs value their own time.