The difference, is that Dropbox is user-facing software, while Kubernetes is software engineer-facing. Dropbox has to be usable by tech-illterate people. Tech-illiterate people have no idea what a Kubernetes is.

There is value in creating a vertically integrated solution in a space, similar to what Dropbox did, so if you find yourself building many of the pieces of Kubernetes internally, it's worth considering if adopting Kubernetes wouldn't be a more efficient use of resources.

That comment has aged brilliantly.

Thanks for that!

how is quoting this here relevant? nobody's saying k8s isn't successful or going to be successful—the argument is whether its complexity and layers of abstraction are worthwhile. dropbox is a tool, k8s is infrastructure. the only similarity between this infamous post and the argument here is that existing tools can be used to achieve the same effect as a product. the response here is "that'll never catch on" (because obviously it has), rather it's "as far as infrastructure for your company goes, maybe the additional complexity isn't worth the turnkey solution"

"You don't need Kubernetes, for a Linux user you can already build a custom solution quite trivially by setting up a custom package repo then build and distribute your application using apt, then configuring SysVinit to monitor your services, whilst using Ansible to configure iptables rules in combination with a simple load balancer you can manage yourself, then use syslog to monitor logs across all your machines whilst hand-waving away secrets management as a problem with 'serverless'"

Yes, you could. Some people do. Others don't, because even if you need a small portion of the features a turnkey solution is likely a better choice in the long run than hand-rolling your own mix of 15+ different technologies to achieve the same thing.

Confounded why sshfs wasn't chosen.

So you have a version of Kubernetes that is as easy to use as Dropbox? Where do I sign up for the beta?