In my experience, people are using k8s et al and microservices because "everyone is doing it", "nobody got fired for choosing microservices", "I need more cloud stuff on my resume" and a vague (and unsubstantiated, unless you're in SF maybe) hope to hire ops staff on the cheap. Frequently, it ends up in a mix of a partial k8s setup for services plus dedicated DB, logging, backup, and other proprietary persistence infrastructure services. In other words, the union of problems/risks, and the intersection of capabilities; and in particular such that moving to another cloud provider is impossible :)

Cloud services is pretty much a business of huge marketing budgets and old-school lock-in strategies.

Can you define what you mean by disaster recovery? To me it means the ability to recover business applications from a site failure.

Assuming you have a similar definition how does Kubernetes solve that problem?

What I mean by DR is that if a data center gets nuked, you still have a replica of your k8's platform running in your other data center(s).

So k8's basically runs a replica of your whole system behind the scenes so if a physical location goes down you still have your system running.

What about all the data in DBMS, file systems, object stores? Also what about BGP routes, firewall settings, SNAT/DNAT rules and the like?

There's a lot more to replicate than just the bits in the apps.

Those are the types of things developers simply don't have experience using. And if Kubernetes tries to replace all of those it will become the new OpenStack.

Yes to all. The most difficult thing is persistent volumes, but leveraging things like Heptio's ark allow you to send them to an alternative storage class. It's awesome stuff.

https://github.com/heptio/ark

Well, that depends where those resources are running and also depends if you're leveraging persistent storage in k8's. All the routes/firewall/dns etc. will be preserved in the event a data center is nuked. Like I said, k8's is replicating your entire system behind the scenes.

Isn't that problem solved equally with VMs?

No, not unless you replicated the VMs accross different data centers manually. Which actually isn't that difficult using docker.