I don't want or need microservices. What I want is for people to stop putting TCP roundtrips in between what would otherwise be simple function calls in a sane universe. I don't want to have to take a graduate-level course on the CAP theorem to clock in and work on whatever "Uber for dogs" nonsense is paying my rent. You almost certainly don't have a scaling problem that necessitates a distributed system, I guarantee it. I have had an average career, and every single time someone shoved a Kubernetes-shaped peg into a server-shaped hole, it's been a shitshow. These systems are slow, expensive, difficult to reason about, and largely unnecessary for most people who handle a few hundred or thoudsand connections per second (on average. Don't @ me about bursty traffic, I understand how it works).

And in a few days, we're going to get a long thread about how software is slow and broken and terrible, and nobody will connect the dots. Software sucks because the way we build it sucks. I've had the distinct privilege of helping another team support their Kubernetes monstrosity, which shat the bed around double-digit requests per second, and it was a comedy of errors. What should've otherwise just been some Rails or Django application with HTML templating and a database was three or four different Kubernetes pods, using gRPC to poorly and unnecessarily communicate with each other. It went down all. The. Time. And it was a direct result of the unnecessary complexity of Kubernetes and the associated pageantry.

I would also like to remind everyone that Kubernetes isn't doing anything your operating system can't do, only better. Networking? Your OS does that. Scheduling? Your OS does that. Resource allocation and sandboxing? If your OS is decent, it can absolutely do that. Access control? Yup.

I can confidently say that 95% of the time, you don't need Kubernetes. For the other 5%, really look deep into your heart and ask yourself if you actually have the engineering problems that distributed systems solve (and if you're okay with the other problems distributed systems cause). I've had five or six jobs now that shoehorned Kubernetes into things, and I can confidently say that the juice ain't worth the squeeze.