[xyzzy123]

Doesn't it depend what staff you have? I would have agreed with this in 2018 but the world has moved on.

If you have a bunch of people who know it, you can deploy a cluster into gcloud or aws with a few clicks or lines of IaC.

Would I recommend a startup team learn kube while trying to ship a product? No.

Would I think it's a red flag if a team who already know it choose it as their preferred platform? Also no.

[ramraj07]

Even if they know it, unless they absolutely need to implement it, why would you waste such valuable resources on of all things infra? (Unless your product IS infra). No engineer I know who’s smart enough to effortlessly deploy k8s on their own would want to do that as the job. There’s a million other interesting things (hopefully?) that they can be doing.

[dinkleberg]

Not at all. If you know Kubernetes well and your needs are fairly simple it takes no time at all.

On a project a couple of years ago my cofounder and I opted to use Kubernetes after running into constant frustration after following the advice to keep it as simple as possible and just use VMs.

Kubernetes makes many complicated things very easy and lets you stop worrying about your infra (provided you’re using a managed provider).

On our next project we used a PaaS offering because we had a bunch of credits for it and it was painful in comparison to what we had with Kubernetes. It was way more expensive (if we didn’t have credits), the deployments were slow, and we had less flexibility.

Kubernetes isn’t perfect, far from it. But for those who know it well it is usually a good option.

[xyzzy123]

Often to get access to things that integrate well with kubernetes.

Personally I don't see too much difference between kube yamls and systemd units and cloudformation or whatever and the "cluster maintenance" itself is not the burden it used to be if you stay on the "paved road" provided by your cloud.

[zelphirkalt]

What about maintenance of that cluster (of possibly only 1 machine) though?