| In my opinion, if you are running containers in prod, you need to be on Kubernetes, regardless of scale. Kubernetes is so much more than just "planet scale". It encourages patterns and mindsets for efficient software delivery that can really pay dividends. Here are some of my favorite things: Cloud agnostic. Your team and business are not at the mercy of pricing, features or availability of a third party. You can run it on everything from a massive cluster on AWS to some cheap mini computers off ebay: https://hackernoon.com/diy-kubernetes-cluster-with-x86-stick... Moving between cloud-providers when they both run Kubernetes is fairly trivial. You can also run on multiple clouds at the same time. Kubernetes abstracts the infrastructure away. It's also really easy to run a single node cluster on your own machine for local development. Try doing that with AWS services in a reliable way. Immutable infrastructure: The fact that containers don't hold state FORCES you to develop your applications in a 12-factor pattern. Deploy images by tag forces you to create a pipeline that automates their builds. It also allows you to effortlessly roll-back. It's not an afterthought or something you need to glue together. High availability: Just define how many replicas of your service you want and k8s does the rest. If they crash so what. Not only will they be restarted automatically but they will automatically be distributed across your fleet for you. Node goes down? Who cares. It's self-healing. Service discovery: Just put a k8s service in front of your application replicas and everything is automatic. Nothing to install, simply refer to the stable dns service name and everything will be routed. Software agnostic. Config Management: Very easy to inject secrets and configs as env vars or mounted into the pod. No third party library or framework needed to leverage it. Dev - Stage - Prod envs made easy: The same container image can move through each env effortlessly and you can be sure there is no "artifact rot" Extensible and open You can run different container runtimes such as rkt or different pod networks and persistent storage options. There is not a single company trying to steer it in some way. Also recently with helm charts it's becoming very easy to "apt-get install" whatever you want on your cluster. Very powerful and portable. It does take some time getting ramped up but once it clicks there is no turning back. |