I did mention myself that small companies should just use cloud services right?
I did not say that everyone should migrate to kubernetes as far as i rmemeber but kubernetes to me is not a fad and it fixes real issues companies have.
And thats why you have to stay on your toes and migrate away if it starts to make sense.
It doesn't make much sense to migrate to k8s if you don't have an issue. And it doesn't make sense to wait for the next thing to happen when you have an issue you need to fix now.
Also i'm not able to determine if your setup would still be much better (faster, easier to maintain etc.) if you would set completly on containers instead of a VM as i'm not aware of your workload at all.
Its really weird that your argument is based on just the cost.
I mean you mentioned yourself you worked at google right?
Perhaps you just haven't actually experienced the issues kubernetes is solving?
How often have you seen that certificates expired? I have seen that. Plenty of times. Its not an issue creating that lets encrypt cronjob, its still something you need to do right.
Security Updates? Have you seen how many companies run with old non updated VMs?
Disk full due to logs? Yes seeing this regularly.
Memory leak on a service and someone needs to restart it manually until someone else fixes the issue? Yes!
Requesting a VM, hardware, infrastructure, getting it and the whole lifecycle management of it in the backend? Its real.
Ansible Scripts, puppet or just bash scripts and a word document to tell you how this magic machine was set up? Yepp.
Kubernetes solves all those problems.
Your static website on borg, if it sill runs, has probably still a valid certificate, is running on a secure infrastructure, is equally configured on every instance and not weird on 1 of 6 servers and just runs.
A smart person taking responsibility for all of this, costs you much more then just a few hundred bucks a month. And you need that person. With Kubernetes, this person now can manage and operate much more servers under his/her fingertips better easier and more secure then if it would have been vms.
And in my personal experience: That shit runs more stable because that shit can restart and being recreated and it just solves a handfull of shitty memory or disk full issues.
The features i mentioned, are solved 'out of the box'. I'm not seeing a huge stretch here at all.
Its costly and risky to run 100 VMs, maintaining them and keeping them up to date, monitoring them and knowing when they are no longer needed.
It is cost ineffective to have security audits on 100 VMs, maintaining access to them, auditing whats happening on them.
It is a ton easier to allow someone only access to one namespace, limited ingress domains (which get provisioned automatically) and allow them to only run non root containersl
The question is not what the actual benefit is (its clear and i mentioned it in my paragraphs before), the question is will kubernetes ever become so lightweight, stable, easy to use so that its feasable for normal people to run it on a 3-5 node cluster in small companies.
And please lets ignore all those small companies where people log into their VMs by hand and maintaining them by using snapshots and cloning existing VMs. Those small companies might and should just migrate to cloud managed services completly.
Do you have any argument for it or is it a generic statement independent of anything?
Because there have been other 'fads' still being strong today.
Kubernetes solves real problems which have been hard for a long time. Its the first thing you, as an infrastructure team, want to have to be able to provide your teams a manageable environment for yourself.
mesos, nomad, docker swarm and co.
Developers don't want a VM and you can't manage and maintain VMs if someone else is doing something with them.
Cloud native is here to stay; It will affect and already affects tools, applications and architecture.
I don't want to start explaining to my mother, over the phone, how to install and use the pdf viewer anymore :|