[ocius]

I'm not an expert on auto scaling groups, but we have used the Google Cloud equivalent for a time. The biggest issue for us was that deployment is not as easy. Can you update the software on the ec2 instance without turning it on, for example? With K8s, we can leave the deployment scaled to 0 and just patch the image of the deployment to perform a release while the workers are all shut down. Similarly, we don't have to write code to wait for the workers to finish their current job before we shut them down in order to be replaced by a newer version; this is all managed by K8s, and the configuration for it lives in Git. As others have already pointed out, it is also important for us to remain independent from Google Cloud / AWS.

[WatchDog]

> Can you update the software on the ec2 instance without turning it on, for example?

Yes, you can build an amazon machine image for ec2, update your cluster with the new image, without scaling from zero.

> As others have already pointed out, it is also important for us to remain independent from Google Cloud / AWS.

This seems like a good reason to use k8s, although as the original article touches on, it seems like switch cloud vendor rarely ever happens.