The “problem” with k8s is not that it’s abstract-y (it’s not inherently any more abstract than docker), it’s that it’s very complex and enterprise-y.

The need for such a complex orchestration layer is not necessarily immediately obvious, until you’ve worked on a complex infra setup that wasn’t deployed with kubernetes. Believe me when you’ve seen the depths of hell that are hundreds of separately configured customer setups using thousands of lines of ansible playbooks, all using ad-hoc systems for creating containers/VMs, with even more ad-hoc and hacked together development and staging environments, suddenly k8s starts looking very appetizing. Instead of an abominable spaghetti of bash scripts, playbooks, and random documentation, one common (albeit complex) set of tools understood by every professional which manages your application deployment & configuration, redundancy, software upgrades, firewall configs, etc.

A small self-hosted production kubernetes cluster doesn’t have to be hard to operate or significantly more expensive than bare-metal; you can buy 3U of rack space, plop in 3 semi-large servers (think 128 GB plus a few TB of SSD RAID), install rancher and longhorn, and now you’ve got a prod cluster large enough for nearly every workload such that if you ever need to upgrade that means you have so many customers that hiring a k8s administrator will be a no-brainer.

Or you can buy minutes from AWS because CapEx is the absolute devil and instead you pay several times as much in OpEx to make it someone else’s problem. But if you’re doing that then you’re not comparing against “installing things the old-fashioned way”.

I push for FOSS everywhere I can at work, but then we acquire a company and they casually drop “oh yeah we’ve built $solution on Azure Containers using Azure SDN with Azure API Gateway and Azure LoadBalancer and Azure Firewall and Azure Backups and Azure Georedundancy and we use Azure SAST and Azure pipelines (replace with microsoft marketing lingo as applicable - I don’t care to learn it). Aside from that we’re vendor-agnostic”.

It’s astonishing how “we can use Azure/AWS but let’s not lock ourselves into proprietary solutions for which FOSS alternatives are readily available” is somehow a controversial statement in some software outfits. Ignoring the sovereignty concerns for a minute, from a business perspective you’re essentially putting all your eggs in one basket and hoping really hard that Microsoft or Amazon don’t pull a Broadcom and bankrupt you one day by hiking prices a few hundred percent.

It boggles the mind how existentially reliant most of the digital world is on the whims of like, three unchecked billionaires.

Very hard disagree. Hearts and minds.

Dafuq else do you expect a random French opposition member to do? Sit there quietly and look pretty? That seems to be the leading strategy for the US Dems and also an irredeemable dereliction of duty. If you are forced into the opposition, be performative. Be loud. Be ungovernable, if necessary.

It’s nice to wish for a world where a fascist regime doesn’t have full control of the USA, but unfortunately we don’t live in that world so please don’t denigrate the work of politicians who at least are doing the bare minimum of saying something about it.