[pm90]

There is a learning curve either way. It’s either an in house container orchestration platform or one of the open source ones. Coinbase seems to have chosen the former.

K8s is simply a good default environment which provides rock solid stability for your applications by outsourcing the distributed systems complexity to your infrastructure team (whether its internal to your company or to a managed one like GKE). Teams are not using it just because it’s “cool” (maybe some are), there is no need to develop in house strategies to deploy and keep an app running and scale it (among other things; this is the lowest common denominator).

It’s the same reason why big data tech has somewhat standardized on a set of tech (spark, airflow etc): once people learn the system, they can focus on building products that provide value rather than building the products and the relevant infrastructure.