This article was written to address what seems like an internal debate or discussion about why they don’t use Kubernetes at Coinbase. As such, it boils down to:

This article was written to address what seems like an internal debate or discussion about why they don’t use Kubernetes at Coinbase. As such, it boils down to: we already use something else, and moving to K8s comes with risks and challenges that outweigh the benefits, particularly security concerns. As a crypto firm, Coinbase rightfully seems zealous about security. The article doesn’t claim that K8s is a bad solution. It only claims that migrating to K8s doesn’t work for them at this point in time. If you are starting something new, or rebuilding a system entirely, and if you are on GCP, and you anticipate the need for scale, then K8s/GKE is a sane choice. What would be insane is trying to roll your own solution. There’s no avoiding the complexity of managing infrastructure, but at least with K8s you won’t be alone, and you won’t make the mistakes others have already made and fixed. Some people never seem to get K8s, in the same way some people never get functional programming. You might be one of them, so that’s something to take into account. A lot of people have had bad experiences with K8s, but just as many have had bad experiences with Docker, or with Linux, or with computers in general. This doesn’t mean the technology is bad. It just means that not every good technology will work for you or your use-case. Kubernetes is a solid choice, especially GKE. But think carefully before deciding to use it. It is one of those tech decisions that will dominate the rest of your choices for years. In my case, it was a decision I‘ve never regretted.