Kubernetes emphatically does not do better at resource utilization than not using Kubernetes. You should figure on between ten and twenty percent of wastage per k8s node, plus the costs of your management servers, in a safely provisioned environment.

You can argue about the configuration-based deployment being worth it--I disagree, because, frankly, Chef Zero is just not that complicated--but it's more expensive in every use case I have seem in the wild (barring ones where instances were unwisely provisioned in the first place).

Based on what evidence? We can put hundreds of customer apps into a few servers and have them deployed and updated easily. We could try to manage this ourselves but it's much less efficient while costing much more effort. GKE also costs nothing for a master and there is no overhead.

K8S/docker also makes it easy to avoid all the systemd/init issues and just use a standard interface with declarative configs and fast deployments that are automatically and dynamically managed while nodes come and go. We have preemptible instances with fast local storage and cheap pricing that maintain 100s of apps. K8S also easily manages any clustered software, regardless of native capabilities, along with easy networking.

Why would I use chef for that - if it can even do all that in the first place?

> GKE also costs nothing for a master and there is no overhead.

Just a historical perspective: GCE used to charge a flat fee for K8s masters after 6 nodes. After the announcement of the Azure K8s service, with no master-fee, GCE has dropped the fee as well :)