Scale, in terms of diversity of use-cases rather than requests per second, seems to be a very important factor in choosing custom, semi-custom or ready-made. K

Scale, in terms of diversity of use-cases rather than requests per second, seems to be a very important factor in choosing custom, semi-custom or ready-made. Kubernetes being "a platform for building platforms" still rings true to me, and it is extremely good at that. One major issue was that the culture wasn't great. SREs without teeth and Platform Engineers that fix the shortcomings of development teams with glue more than anything. As for why contractors, this was the IT division of a big retail business that refused to pay competitive salaries in solidarity with their other workers, but never fired anyone for underperforming (or not performing at all), so the people that actually get work done tend to leave pretty fast. They tried to compensate this with contractors. Some departments were fine, and I loved the team (high standards, created lots of value for teams), but it wasn't a great long term workplace.