> It wasn't just swarm vs k8s

I'm not seeing anything in their comment that would imply this.

How is it reductive?

I do ask the same question for all those other systems, or the meta-question: "How is it that the bloated monstrosity of Kubernetes somehow became the de-facto container orchestration tool?"

Is this just sysadmins buying themselves job security?

On the contrary, nobody was thinking of the sysadmins (until we injected the notion of Operators rather late).

Devs chose K8s, I think the evangelism phrase was “developer dopamine”. It felt like the Rails of DIY infra, where devs could inherit an opinioned pattern for doing n>1.

There’s still decades of resentment of devs being gated by IT.

Is that so? My experience is the opposite: devs don't want to learn Kubernetes YAML, they just want to git push and have someone else take care of deployment.

Devs chose K8s, really?

As someone who doesn't want to be a sysadmin, but wants to deploy applications to the cloud, the options are fairly limited. Kubernetes handles updates and scaling, networking between services, has managed offerings from all the major cloud providers, has an enormous ecosystem surrounding it, with many tools providing out of the box support for it.

I could use docker swarm, or nomad, but I have to manage infrastructure, write my own integrations, manage the underlying hardware.

Or I can run az aks create and be off to the races

Sure, at this point it's a self-fulfilling prophecy: K8s is almost the only game in town because...it's almost the only game in town.

But how did it get to that point? How did something so big and unwieldy that even billion-dollar cloud providers can't do upgrades on it properly (*cough* looking at you, EKS) become the go-to standard for running apps in containers?