[theptip]

For me (small startup) this is the killer feature of k8s. I'm not operating at a scale where "cluster scheduling" is a thing I need to care about, though self-healing and load-balanced services are nice.

To be able to stand up an exact copy of my application on a dev machine, or even better in a review app per-branch (complete with DNS entry and TLS cert) is incredibly valuable. You can run through essentially all of the deploy pipeline before even merging, including SSL config tests etc.

[bonesss]

In addition to the dev benefits, there is also a built in cloud scaling story and strategy.

It's not like every app needs that kind of robustness, but there is a certain calming security in knowing that if any part of your Kubernetes deployed app actually needs to go "web scale", or someone asks about 100 times the users you have ever considered, that the answer is straightforward and reasonably pre-configured.