It’s great to see that Mitmproxy is still being developed - it indirectly made my career.
Back in 2011, I was using it to learn API development by intercepting mobile app requests when I discovered that Airbnb’s API was susceptible to Rails mass assignment (https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/5228). I then used it to modify some benign attributes, reached out to the company, and it landed me an interview. Rest is history.
I worked on Turbotax as a co-op back in 2009/10 so things have definitely changed but two things stood out to me. First, there were two “peaks” one around January 19th (when the first wave of W2s goes out) and one around April 15th.
Second, was around the migration from desktop to online. At the time, TurboTax was one of the earliest tax prep products that had a cloud offering. It had done so in a somewhat interesting way. In order to maintain parity between the tax calculations and segregate tax data, they were running an instance of the desktop software for each web user server side. It would then use a Java process to convert the desktop UI to HTML (somewhat IE specific) and output it back to the user. It was very inefficient from the resource side but it made me appreciate how nimble this large company was in adapting to new mediums.
I'm in the same camp. I think a lot of these anti-k8s articles are written by software developers who haven't really been exposed to the world of SRE and mostly think in terms of web servers.
A few years ago I joined a startup where everything (including the db) was running on one, not-backed-up, non-reproducible, VM. In the process of "productionizing" I ran into a lot of open questions: How do we handle deploys with potentially updated system dependencies? Where should we store secrets (not the repo)? How do we manage/deploy cronjobs? How do internal services communicate? All things a dedicated SRE team managed in my previous role.
GKE offered a solution to each of those problems while allowing me to still focus on application development. There's definitely been some growing pains (prematurely trying to run our infra on ephemeral nodes) but for the most part, it's provided a solid foundation without much effort.