> If Kubernetes does indeed provide the best solution to provide scalability and availability, one can argue that this would result in a decreased demand for dev ops engineers, as they "would just have to use Kubernetes".

I'd say it would result in either:

- the same scalability and availability with fewer DevOps engineers - better scalability and availability with a similar number or more DevOps engineers

In my experience, it's almost always the second case that happens. For example, a service would be moved from a few (virtualized or physical) servers that can only be scaled manually, to a k8s cluster with either autoscaling or at least scaling by changing a configuration file.

Right. Most companies aren't content to settle for doing the same thing they were doing but with fewer engineers when they realize they could be using those other engineers to automate even more things (via Kubernetes operators).