* Host hundreds or thousands of interacting containers across multiple teams in sane manner * Let's you manage and understand how is it done in the full extent.
Of course there are tons of organizations that can (and should) easily resign from one of these, but if you need both, there isn't better choice right now.
If they understood their system, odds are they’d realize that horizontal scaling with few, larger services is plenty scalable.
At those large orgs, the individual developer doesn’t matter at all and the EMs will opt for faster release cycles and rely on internal platform teams to manage k8s and things like it.
Of course there are simpler container runtimes, but they have issues with scale, cost, features or transparency of operation. Of course they can be good fit if you're willing to give up one or more of these.
Yes, complex tools tend to be powerful.
But when I say “devs who care about knowing how their code works” I’m also referring to their tools.
K8s isn’t incomprehensible, but it is very complex, especially if you haven’t worked in devops before.
“Devs who care…” I would, assume, would opt for simpler tools.
I know I would.
* H: "kubernetes [at planetary scale] is too complex"
* A: "you can run it on a toaster and it's simpler to reason about than systemd + pile of bash scripts"
* H: "what's the point of single node kubernetes? I'll just SSH in and paste my bash script and call it a day"
* A: "but how do you scale/maintain that?"
* H: "who needs that scale?"
What's a bit different is we're creating own products, not renting people to others, so having uniform hosting platform is actual benefit.
What looks like absurd scale to one team is a regular Tuesday for another, because "scale" is completely meaningless without context. We don't balk at a single machine running dozens of processes for a single web browser, we shouldn't balk at something running dozens of containers to do something that creates value somehow. And scale that up by number of devs/customers and you can see how thousands/hundreds of thousands can happen easily.
Also the cloud vendors make it easy to have these problems because it's super profitable.
I mean, if that's your starting point, then complexity is absolutely a given. When folks complain about the complexity of Kubernetes, they are usually complaining about the complexity relative to a project that runs a frontend, a backend, and a postgres instance...
We did not have a cluster just for a single application (with some exceptions because those applications were incredibly massive in pod numbers) and/or had patterns that required custom handling and pre-emptive autoscaling (which we wrote code for!).
Why are so many companies running a cluster for each application? That's madness.
I migrated one such firm off Kubernetes last year, because for their use case it just wasn't worth it - keeping the cluster upgraded and patched, and their CI/CD pipelines working was taking as much IT effort as the rest of their development process