[eropple]

I used to work at IBM and I have first-hand experience with exactly how wonderful (that smell is not the dog, that is sarcasm) their Kubernetes implementation is; without mincing words, I would consider IBM's enthusiastic adoption of k8s to be a warning sign rather than a positive indicator. VMware, ditto, they're a trailing-edge company flailing for modern relevance. Azure is a cloud provider so persistently awful that they and IBM are the only ones I'd refuse a client on because it's not worth the frustration; not sure I'd bet on their thinking, either. And GCP--sure, the people who made k8s like k8s, that stands to reason.

Containers are fine deployment tools, sure. And Fargate is a better management and monitoring framework than whatever you'll roll together, while also not making you pay overhead for hot-spare and failover inventory. (Their prices used to be really wacky; if you dig through HN you will find a post from the day Fargate was announced where I looked at the numbers and had some Questions. I do not anymore.) I get that you have GPU stuff to deal with, and maybe that doesn't work for you--but EC2 instances probably do, can be sized better, and can be dynamically scaled without breaking your back. Things you don't pay for are cheaper than things you do, you know?

On-premises--yeah, sure, use k8s, it's literally the only place where it makes any sense to do so. Of course, you could write good code with clear interfaces and separation of concerns so you can figure out an on-prem story after you have a product and after you have a business, but again, I too like rabbit-holing on stuff that doesn't help me ship. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Good luck, I guess.