[dminor]

Early on in the container hype cycle we decided to convert some of our services from VMs to ECS. It was easy to manage and the container build times were so much better than AMI build times.

Some time down the road we got acquired, and the company that acquired us ran their services in their own Kubernetes cluster.

When we were talking with their two person devops team about our architecture, I explained that we deployed some of our services on ECS. "Have you ever used it?" I asked them.

"No, thank goodness" one of them said jokingly.

By this time it was clear that Kubernetes had won and AWS was planning its managed Kubernetes offering. I assumed that after I became familiar with Kubernetes I'd feel the same way.

After a few months though it became clear that all these guys did was babysit their Kubernetes cluster. Upgrading it was a routine chore and every crisis they faced was related to some problem with the cluster.

Meanwhile our ECS deploys continued to be relatively hassle free. We didn't even have a devops team.

I grew to understand that managing Kubernetes was fun for them, despite the fact that it was overkill for their situation. They had architected for scale that didn't exist.

I felt much better about having chosen a technology that didn't "win".

[p_l]

A lot depended on whether the ECS fit what you needed. ECSv1, even with FarGate, was so limited that my first k8s use was pretty much impossible on it at sensible price points, for example.

[jakupovic]

So you don't use things you don't understand, valid point. But, saying others are using k8s as a way to use up free time is pretty useless too as we have managed k8s offerings and thus don't need the exercise. If you don't need k8s don't use it, thanks. Pretty useless story honestly