[throwaway894345]

> So what happens is people convince themselves that the existing tech sucks and use that to rationalize doing the rewrite.

That certainly is a thing that happens, but you could use that to dismiss any technology at all. In the case of Kubernetes, it makes operations a lot easier to the (important) effect that the development teams can do a lot of their own operations work. This is important since they're the ones who are empowered to solve operations problems and it also eliminates the blame game between ops and dev. Further, it eliminates a lot of coordination with a separate ops team--the dev teams aren't competing to get time from an ops team; they can solve their own problems, especially the most common ones. This also has the nice property of freeing the SREs to work on high-level automation, including integrating tools from the ecosystem (e.g., cert-manager, external-dns, etc).

Kubernetes certainly isn't the final stage in the evolution, but it's a welcome improvement.

[a1369209993]

> but you could use that to dismiss any technology at all

No, you can't; you need three (-ish) factors:

1. The technology is sufficiently incompatible with what you're currently using that you need a rewrite to use it (eg, this generally doesn't happen with gcc -> llvm, for example).

2. The technology is sufficiently (faux-)popular that it's possible to convince a pointy-haired boss that you need to switch to it (eg, this won't work with COBOL anymore, though unfortunately it successor Java is still going).

3. The technology sucks.

And really, if you want to dismiss a technology, point 3 ought to be enough all on its own (particularly since that's presumably the reason you want to dismiss that technology).

[throwaway894345]

I think in your eagerness to 'gotcha' me, you missed my point. :)

Anyway, we're trying to assess Kubernetes' value proposition (i.e., to answer "does it suck?"). If your system for answering that question depends on already knowing the answer, it's not a very useful system.

[a1369209993]

> we're trying to assess Kubernetes' value proposition (i.e., to answer "does it suck?").

Well, I'm not, since I already know that, but if you don't know that yet, then your position makes more sense. (That is, using "dismiss" in the sense of finding out that it sucks, rather than (as I read it) in the sense of justifying a refusal to use technology that you already know sucks.)

Unfortunately, due to market-for-lemons dynamics, it's usually not possible to convey knowledge that a particular technology sucks until things have already gone horribly wrong. See eg COBOL or (the Java-style corruption of) Object Oriented Programming.