I find it amazing how people take the absolute shittiest practice from the past and compare it to k8s and reach the conclusion k8s is better.

Have you ever done IaC where the whole copy of the infra came up on deployment and traffic was shifted between old and new? And developers could spin up their own stack with one Cloudformation or Terraform command? Have you used cloud primitives that solve most of the problems you are reinventing with k8s?

Yep, that's the typical straw-man from K8S zealots: compare static, even bare-metal setups with theK8S API "revolution", forgetting that the "clouds" (both public and private) already had APIs that covered most of it. Sure, there are some nice additions on top of that like "operators" that take advantage of the main loop you have already perpetually running in a k8s cluster, but the leap is not that astronomical as some says.

If you think those APIs don't need tons of scripts to be useful to a company, then either you do everything through the AWS console, or you are an anti-k8s zealot yourself.

There are many established solutions on top of those APIs, that let you manage them with code, DSLs, graphical UIs etc. (i.e. Terraform, Harness, Pulumi, Spinnaker etc)

In fact I am not arguing against TF, which I love. I don't know how that came up here, k8s is at a different level in the stack.

It came up here because with Terraform you can automate many parts of the cloud (VMs) provisioning and deployment.

I have done everything from deploying to Tomcat servers to modern k8s. I really don't like Cloudformation and ECS, arcane and poorly documented syntax. I like much more having a Helm chart for my apps. Have you ever tried to set up private DNS in ECS for services to talk? That doesn't look simple (or well documented) at all to me.

By the way, Terraform and k8s are not exclusive, I use them together.