It references the effort and money wasted by people that wanted to build cloud providers despite not being in the business of being a cloud provider.
Kubernetes has it's roots in Omega which was a research project to explore improvements to Borg.
It was created/released as a direct response to increasing lock-in of AWS and Azure PaaS like services that were becoming an existential threat to GCP ever gaining any marketshare.
Unlike OpenStack it did actually manage to mostly achieve it's goal of preventing lock-in by creating a standardized API in which all distributions/managed-providers need to provide and actually certifying that they do. OpenStack failed in this regard because it was overrun by vendor interests too quickly and suffered poor governance. Additionally the leading vendors of the time simply ignored it because none of them offered a compatible API layer and none of them cared about any of the upstarts that did. Also it turned out very few people wanted to build their own IaaS if it would be incompatible with AWS and bursting would be awkward.
k8s successfully learnt from these mistakes.
So it's contributions are two-fold.
1) Single-handedly forced the other 2 major vendors to implement a standard API.
2) Created an infrastructure OSS ecosystem above this API layer that broadly has been successful with enterprise interests while abiding by the governance model set out by core k8s.
These alone make it a very successful project even if you disagree with the technical implementation/merits.
> 1) Single-handedly forced the other 2 major vendors to implement a standard API.
I (and I'm sure you too, you seem intelligent) would be surprised if say EKS is anywhere close to ECS usage. k8s is considered so complex/poor Amazon sell ECS-on-prem.
It's the epitome of resume driven development - nobody uses k8s for any other reason except to say they use k8s.
Same as most people, and as previously mentioned: I pay pay a cloud provider, unless my business is being a cloud provider.
Right now I'd use Pulumi, years ago I'd use Terraform, or the AWS API - I part of the first node AWS API client and part of App Engine before k8s existed. k8s didn't invent infra as code or auto provisioning capacity. The fact that it's advocates act like it did is why k8s is a DevOps meme.
> your instances are eventually going to scale down to 0 and not wake up if no HTTP requests are incoming
That's a good thing. I think you don't understand Serverless.
I stated several things it contributed -even if you think it's too complex-.
If you don't understand why people use k8s you don't understand the problems it solves. Especially if you think ECS is a substitute.