Reproducibility, automation, scaling.

20 years ago I managed thousands of machines through ssh and was able to maintain them all to the same setup.

Nowadays I see people spend man-years developing tools to ensure consistent deployment on 10 machines. Not only do the tools not even work, they take months to land a change that could be done manually in two minutes.

Bet you didn't do canary or blue/green deploys, or deliver automated telemetry data, or guarantee resource quotas, or provide network attached storage, or etc. etc.

Because Kubernetes is both abstraction and de facto standardized platform across infrastructure providers. All deployments to customers who are large institutions start with provisioning, OS alignment (there are huge differences between RHEL, SLES, Debian or Amazon, then customisations like hardenings are put on top), networking, storage, access rights. You don't want to deal with that from scratch each time. It costs both time and money. Direct dealing with hardware is long gone (Hyper-V and VMware), and now it's time to cut out the upper layers. Also, Kubernetes allows better resource utilisation and scaling.

> SSH into the host whenever you need to see how things are performing

These SSH people is how EC2 instances get hacked. Please stop and use telemetry.

There's also the SSM agent for people that feel the need to touch their instance.

While I understand the appeal of SSM, in practice it's just sub-par tooling.