Kubernetes is an incredibly powerful tool that has become the go-to solution for application deployment. Since its origins stem in Google, it has enjoyed its fair share of hype in the industry. And as with everythig hyped, quite often it is being adopted by companies, despite being an overkill, for the wrong reasons.
So here are five wrong reasons for which we often see companies using Kubernetes.
Scales infinitely
Companies rush to buy into future-proof solutions to ensure scaling of their applications to support milllions of users from the get go. However, scalability has nothing to do with Kubernetes. Even applications like Google or Facebook scaled massively before Kubernetes or even containers were even a thing. Kubernetes will do more harm than good if an application does not require the extensive management features it provides.
Adopted by everyone
It is a common pattern across organizations to employ tools because they are already used extensively — after all, no one was fired for hiring IBM! The fact is, that neither this argument is correct, nor it would make Kubernetes suitable for a particular company, even if it was indeed correct. What is actually needed is tooling that can be trusted and managed by the existing team.
Built by Google
Yes, Kubernetes was originally developed by Google, by some of the best engineers out there. Does that alone justify its use for any ambitious team? Absolutely not. Most teams' needs are quite distant from Google's. A great-built overkill is still an overkill.
It is cool
Yes, Kubernetes is an incredibly cool technology that is super fun to tinker with. In a production system though it is critical to be able to reduce the management and moving pieces to a minimum. Kubernetes will not be cool, when its seemingly managed cloud offering will require a manual upgrade that induce downtime.
It is cloud-native
The term "cloud-native" has been thrown around so much, that it practically means nothing. If an application doesn't inherently benefit from features mentioned as cloud-native like autoscaling, service discovery, or multi-cloud orchestration.
To wrap this up, Kubernetes is indeed a wonderful tool, but it's not a one-size-fits-all solution. Early stage startups are better off with a Platform as a Service or a serverless solution to avoid operational costs and DevOps overhead completely. More demanding setups can benefit even more by tools like Docker Swarm which provide crucial container orchestration functionality (e.g. service discovery, secret management, state reconciliation) with a fraction of the complexity. Finally, a significantly complex setup (e.g. unpredictable traffic spikes, multiple microservices, diverse workloads including web services, workers, GPU processes etc.) can absolutely benefit from a solution like Kubernetes.
Technology is here to make things simpler, not complicate them. The choice better be wise!
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