> Do you need to do rolling deployments? Boom. Kubernetes pays for itself right there.m
No, you don’t need to do rolling deployments.
> Do you need someone else to join you on ops duties? Boom. If they know Kubernetes, they can easily find their way around your system.
Easier than ssh’ing in and running ps?
Don’t get me wrong, k8 is great if you need to manage a complex system. It’s just that most of the time you can choose to not build a complex system in the first place.
Have you ever been thrown into an unknown environment? SSH'ing where exactly? Oh but this runs at hosting partner X? That runs at hosting partner Y? Oh but this service is actually behind a reverse proxy running on box Z. Oh you need to RDP to a jump-server to SSH to those machines? Documentation? You mean these outdated Word documents and Excel sheets? And down the rabbit-hole you go. Fun!
And don't say that doesn't happen, I'm a freelance sysadmin - and am exactly in an environment like that right now, it's not the first, and won't be the last. To get a complete picture here, I needed 2 whole months for everything outside the Openshift clusters.
The stuff running on openshift was pretty simple, there is the master, here are your credentials - and that's it. The rest is pretty easy to figure out if you've worked with k8s/openshift. The biggest problem was knowing if the app in question ran on Openshift or somewhere else.
I’m not arguing that k8s is the wrong tool to manage that kind of complexity. I’m arguing that, in almost all cases, that kind of complexity is completely unwarranted.
In a way, it turns all sorts of things into simple algebra - ax + b. So time = scope / bandwidth + latency. If latency dominates, it takes longer. If bandwidth dominates, goes faster.
Do you need to do rolling deployments? Boom. Kubernetes pays for itself right there. And that's just tip of the iceberg. Do you need someone else to join you on ops duties? Boom. If they know Kubernetes, they can easily find their way around your system. Your bespoke system? They're trying to grok your lack of documentation.
It's a latency/bandwidth thing. The learning curve is the latency. The advantages it brings to the table is the bandwidth. As such, I think it's a great investment even for small businesses/teams, but it's not a good investment for a solo developer who doesn't know it, unless they want to be learning Kubernetes rather than building their project.