[stekern]

(Author here)

The main focus of the post is to highlight some of the long-term risks and consequences of standardizing around Kubernetes in an org. If you've done a proper evaluation, and still think Kubernetes makes sense for you, then it's probably a sound decision. But I think many skip the evaluation step or do it hastily. The post is more targeted towards organizations with at least a handful of employees. What works for an indy dev does not necessarily scale and work for SMBs or larger orgs - those are very different contexts.

> The article suggests just using EC2 instead of K8s

Not quite. I suggest strongly considering using managed services when it makes sense for your organization. The equivalent of k8s in terms of managed services would be Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) as the control plane, perhaps with AWS Fargate as the compute runtime.

(I wouldn't really call EC2 a managed service - it's more in the territory of Infrastructure as a Service)

[doctor_eval]

I may have misread ECS as EC2 and I apologise for that.

But the argument you make should certainly be applied to other managed services. AWS generally has opaque pricing, and significant hidden complexity - are you really going to just subscribe to ecs and fargate? Or are you subscribing to a bunch of other complexities like CloudWatch, IAM, EBS, etc etc? If I want to control costs then do I also need some third party service? How many IOPS does my database need, anyway?

I’m not an AWS user, because every time I’ve looked at it I’ve come away shaking my head at how complex everything is, and how much vendor specific technology I need to learn just to do something simple.

And, having run organisations with more than a handful of employees, if there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that simplicity is a virtue.

In fact, the last company I was involved with went all-in on AWS which involved formal training for everyone, very high costs, and multiple dedicated administrators. My part of the business pre dated that decision, and we did well over 10x the throughput with a single dedicated ops expert, using our own gear, orchestrated with docker-swarm. Our costs were literally 10% of the cost of AWS for the other part of the business, including amortisation of the hardware, and that’s before all the extra training and operational costs of AWS.

Today, it’s far easier to run K8s than it was to run swarm back then. So quite honestly, if you’re an Indy developer like me, K8s is almost a no brainer, and if you’re a mid sized SaaS shop, AWS is just a really great example of spending tens of thousands of dollars a month to say you’re running in AWS.