Kubernetes: When It's the Right Choice (And When You're Just LARPing)

Kubernetes is a phenomenal tool for the right problem. It is also, in my experience, the most over-adopted tool in our industry. Here's a sharper decision framework.

Kubernetes solves a hard problem: scheduling many containers across many machines with declarative configuration, self-healing, rolling deploys, etc.

If that's not your problem, K8s is wrong for you.

When K8s is right

• You have 50+ services
• You have meaningful platform engineers (1+ FTE on infra)
• Your scaling profile is variable (auto-scaling actually does work)
• You need multi-cloud or on-prem flexibility
• Your team has K8s expertise already

When K8s is overkill

• Fewer than 10 services
• No dedicated platform person
• Static load (you don't scale)
• AWS-only or GCP-only and willing to embrace native services
• Your team's K8s expertise is "watched some YouTube videos"

What I recommend instead

For most startups (under 50 engineers, under 20 services):

• Vercel for the web tier (Next.js or whatever)
• Cloud Run (GCP) or App Runner (AWS) for backend services
• Managed Postgres (RDS, Neon, Supabase)
• Managed Redis (ElastiCache, Upstash)

You give up zero capability you actually use. You save 1-2 platform engineers worth of operational overhead.

When you've outgrown that:

• ECS Fargate is the gentle on-ramp from "managed PaaS" to "container orchestration." Less powerful than K8s but 5x easier to operate.
• EKS / GKE come into play when you need K8s-specific features (operators, custom controllers, cross-cloud)

The hidden cost of K8s

Operating K8s is a full-time job for ~1 person at any company below 200 engineers. Networking, RBAC, ingress controllers, storage classes, node upgrades, certificate rotation, monitoring stack - it's a lot.

If you can't articulate the dollar value K8s is generating for you above what Cloud Run / App Runner would give you, you're paying that operational tax for no return.

The harder truth

A lot of K8s adoption is about hiring brand and resume-padding, not engineering need. Be honest with yourself about why you're considering it. The right answer for your team is rarely the same as the right answer for Google.

References

• Kubernetes documentation
• AWS App Runner
• GCP Cloud Run
• ECS Fargate