Wanted to post this talk for those who might still be on the fence about the value provided by a platform like k8s or the ecosystem (or at least knowing vaguely what it is/why it exists) -- k8s isn't the usual high hype low value proposition.
k8s isn't the first container orchestration system, and it likely won't be the last, but it's the only one that has official, branded support from just about every big cloud vendor. This is different.
If we really want to get into how I feel about it, I think k8s is a step change in how people deploy applications -- for context some things I consider "previous" steps are containers ("bare" in that they're managed by systemd/ansible/chef/whatever else), VMs, processes on shared hardware (i.e. no isolation), CGI, Java app servers/Servlet containers, etc).
Just wanted to at least present the idea that K8S isn't just a hype train (I won't name other technologies that were bad investments but certainly were hyped a lot) -- it is definitely far from perfect, and has a high initial complexity but it certainly is delivering on some things people haven't been able to get consistently right for years.