Yes, because orchestrating storage volumes, network policies, redundancy, secrets, and containers on a cluster with potentially heterogeneous nodes (some might have a GPU, some might not), is a waste of resource
> you don’t need Kubernetes to have declarative infrastructure as code
True.
> Addicted to yaml? Ansible uses YAML
Yes, because rollbacks in case of failure are so easy to do with Ansible. And who cares about an API that is becoming wide-spread (to not say standard) so you don't have to relearn everything when jumping from project to project?
> your build steps and doesn’t leave detritus like an agent nor waste any target resources
Only if you wrote your playbooks properly. Which is hard.
> Avoid containers unless you have a specific reason for using them. It’s a silly trend, IMO
Yes, because who cares about isolations, reproducibility, and avoiding the "it works on my machine" when integrating your app on different OS with various configurations?
> I fail to see what anti-lock-in benefits either containers or Kubernetes provide.
This sums up your whole unhelpful comment.
Kubernetes is a waste of computer resources if we are speaking about production deployments. What is your container distro? Alpine? Just run your app on alpine! It’s not that complicated. Networking will actually function properly and safely and you don’t need Kubernetes to have declarative infrastructure as code. Addicted to yaml? Ansible uses YAML, can reproduce your build steps and doesn’t leave detritus like an agent nor waste any target resources.
Avoid containers unless you have a specific reason for using them. It’s a silly trend, IMO