Right, and GCP and Azure do it better on GCP and Azure. I've got no attachment to AWS, I just have to use it right now so it was the first one that came to mind.
Somewhere between "I'm small enough that all of the cloud providers are about the same" and "I'm big enough that I can leverage them against each other to get a better deal, but still small enough to not be on metal" there is maybe a sweet spot where I really do need to be mobile across providers in a push-button way. People in e.g. blockchain use k8s to good effect because they want to run a big distributed system with loose-ish central organization, and that's a real thing. It's also a niche.
I never said Kubernetes was useless full stop. I said that places where it's the right call are niche.
My current gig is humble, a usually-raman-profitable type garage band, we're like 5 engineers with Ethernet cables in our living rooms and a bigger AWS bill than feels fair, and if I proposed to any of the ex-FAANG type people involved that we should get serious about Kubernetes they'd laugh themselves pink in the face and resume typing. We can give our machines names and remember them all, there are a few dozen of them, but that's still "pets".
If we're fortunate and hard-working enough to need 1k machines, I'll spin up a ZK instance or something and write a little Nix/bash.
I won't be networking at KubeCon 2023 unless I lose a bet to one of my peers. I've got work to do.
Conversely I recently worked with a five-person company using Kubernetes to great effect with nearly a hundred customers. Being able to just commit a new .yaml to stand up or tear down resources is a real force-multiplier.
I do entirely agree with you, I think: there are too many companies using Kubernetes prematurely, but...
It's kind of turned out okay? Because of this, the ecosystem seems to be improving and it's easier than ever for small shops to get started. And selling software that targets Kubernetes is leagues better than targeting Ubuntu or Red Hat or specific kernels.
> I'll spin up a ZK instance
If I never have to run another ZooKeeper instance again I'll die happy.
