That answers my question, they can afford it if they wanted to. Obviously they don't want to. I'm in their camp when it comes to the cloud vs own hardware.

How much will the many extra employees they will need cost them in 5 years?

Even if they had to hire two or three people to work on this full time (they won't) it'd still be a massive savings.

Depends on the quality and hr overhead.

Oncall, new features, security etc.

No small it department I worked with, was anywhere close to the features and quality of Google and co.

Maybe they'd rather pay coworkers than a giant tech company.

If I were small/mid company owner that would be perfectly good reason.

Which seems to be also the case for Basecamp/37signals.

Zero, which is why we're not using k8s on-prem. Our team is already handling the on-prem hardware/software environment, and this will consolidate our apps on a single platform methodology, allowing us to keep the same team size. Using mrsk allows us reduce the complexity of our servers, moving that into the Dockerfile.

If we had gone down the k8s on-prem rabbit-hole, I suspect we would have required more folks to manage those components and complexity.

I don't understand how having k8s means you need significantly more people.

It's just concepts put into a strict system. Now you're just shimming the same concepts with less supported hacks. Now you have to train your team on less used technology that isn't transferable to other roles. Sounds like technical debt to me.

We're arguing about generic approaches and the 37Signals folks are making specific decisions about their very specific situation (their app, their staff having time or not, their budget, etc).

To be fair, they don't seem to be saying their strategy is for everybody but the audience thinks so? I think we're talking past each other, tbh.

For me it's still the 'nor getting what issue they had with k8s'.

And I would love to spend a few days with there team to understand it.

wow, TIL the founder of RoR races LMP2 in Le Mans

he may have just become my new hero