[johnmarcus]

I've been running K8s since it's first stable released. It worked wonderfully for a 30 micro-service stack of node.js and Scala applications for a financial services company. I would never want to manage that many services in ec2 or ecs instances.

I also baked a 25+service AI platform onto 4 virtual machines, running kubernetes, for deployment in an air-gapped system without a knowladgable operator. It was an excellent choice for that project because of the auto-healing capabilities.

I have also run it at a small startup where we had a combination of static nginx sites, ruby on rails sites, elixer sights, node.js app, and even a c++ app. (it was at a crypto company if you are wondering why so many disparate languages). Having a single deploy pipeline for 5+ different languages and architectures was awesome. I would have killed myself if I needed to support all of those in their native environments at the same time.

There are lots of good use cases for k8s, and honestly it's not that hard if you already have system admin skills because you understand the problems it solves and how it works. Most of the folks I have seen struggle with it are developers (and likewise, I struggle with OOP sometimes - i don't mean to diminish developers skills).