I manage an engineering team at one of the big 3 cloud providers advising startups on their cloud deployments. We often get earlier stage startups asking us for help with building their deployments on Kubernetes. We often suggest they consider a simpler solution, so that they can focus on building their product and not worry about managing k8s. Some of them do. Most stick with k8s. Rather than assume that they all don't know what they're doing, I tried to take their point-of-view and understand why they're making this choice. What I learnt makes a lot of sense:

1. You won't get fired for choosing K8S. Tech leads of startups, just like anyone in a position of responsibility, need to be a bit conservative with their choices. As CTO, if something went wrong with your deployments, or you're having scaling issues, the last thing you want is to have to explain to your CEO or your investors why you've chosen a less popular and recognisable product.

2. Startups are conscious about vendor lock-in (or any kind of lock-in). That makes a lot of sense - early in the days of a startup you don't really know what direction it will take, so you want to keep your options open. Make a choice that limits your freedom later down the road and it could be fatal to your startups as it grows and adapts. It's reasonable to agree to pay a price for this flexibility.

3. Hiring good engineers is always hard, and you don't want to make it harder for yourself by choosing technologies that are less familiar. A common objection would be that basic technologies like containers, VMs, and serverless functions are easy to adjust to for most engineers, but as a startup you really need to optimise for the common denominator or you risk wasting time on onboarding engineers on tech they are not familiar with.

4. Startups often don't spend as much time and energy on familiarising themselves with every new technological development and option. They are busy building a product. It could be that there's another, better option for them, other than the most recognised brand in the industry, but if they spent their time on learning and evaluating all these options that's time they wouldn't spend building and shipping features to their users.

5. Startups are optimistic by nature. They have to be. Tell them that they don't need the complexity of K8S at their current scale and they'll just remind you that they're aiming for ∞X, any day now. Most of them will not reach even 10X any time soon, but they have the right attitude to behave as if they will.