[karmarepellent]

To be fair in other comments OP made an effort not to get involved into those endless Kubernetes vs VM discussions. However either side eventually posts a snarky comment and there goes.

I think everyone just has to acknowledge that there are use cases for both. Also Kubernetes and "classic" configuration management via Ansible (or others) are orthogonal to each other. So these discussions are somewhat misguided in the first place.

For example: you might want to deploy a VM or auto-install and configure a physical machine with custom tooling and something like Ansible or Puppet and _then_ configure said machine as a Kubernetes node that handles the actual workloads. In other cases some Dev might want to install and run an application without the k8s layer using Nginx as a webserver. In this case, too, Puppet/Ansible might or might not be involved in configure the application but only handle the "OS layer" if there is such a thing. And in yet other cases you get away with a simple cloud-init script that makes your machine a k8s node and leave out other configuration management tools altogether.

Guess what: All of this is fine. Evaluate solutions based on what you need, not what other people working in giant corporations urge you to use. And then go and build it, ideally having fun doing it.

Representing either tool as a one-size-fits-all is misguiding at best and seems to be overly simplistic to the complex problem of deploying your applications.