I think that Kubernetes has advantages for many small services but a few large services are still worth managing directly on bare machines/VMs. Where I disagre

I think that Kubernetes has advantages for many small services but a few large services are still worth managing directly on bare machines/VMs. Where I disagree with this article is on Kubernetes stability and manageability. The caveat is that GKE is easy to manage and EKS is straightforward but not quite easy. Terraform with a few flags for the google-gke module can manage dozens of clusters with helm_release resources making the clusters production-ready with very little human management overhead. EKS is still manageable but does require a bit more setup per cluster, but it all lives in the automation and can be standardized across clusters. Daily autoscaling is one of those things that some people can get away with, but most won't save money. For example, prices for reservations/commitments are ~65% of on-demand. Can a service really scale so low during off-hours that average utilization from peak machine count is under 35%? If so, then autoscale aggressively and it's totally worth it. Most services I've seen can't actually achieve that and instead would be ~60% utilized over a whole day (mostly global customer bases). The exception is if you can scale (or run entirely with loose enough SLOs) into spot or preemptible instances which should be about as cheap as committed instances at the risk of someday not being available.