Regarding the basic idea that "best practices are not always best" I've been involved in a lot of these conversations at small startups, and mostly around techn

Regarding the basic idea that "best practices are not always best" I've been involved in a lot of these conversations at small startups, and mostly around technologies like Kubernetes. But every time I say something critical about Kubernetes, someone responds, "So you think Google is stupid? You think the engineers at Google don't know what they're doing?" To which I always respond: "Are you Google? Are you running 10 million boxes at 50 data centers in 30 countries? If not, you might consider a simpler approach." I do get that big companies find something like Docker/Kubernetes useful for security, scaling, and especially, dealing with the homogenous nature of the varied software stacks that typically build up in a large corporation. However, my message to the small startups I consult with is, "Keep it simple. If possible, just stick with something like Heroku for awhile, or a few big, beefy machines. You don't need High Availability, you can survive with 99.99% uptime for now. You've got an engineering team of 3 people, so keep everything simple." And yet I still get some pushback, people saying, "No, we want play in the big leagues, we want everything to be perfect right from the start." That kind of perfectionism can kill a startup. That kind of perfectionism is entirely at odds with the spirit of a "minimal viable product." Yet I keep having clients who want to prematurely imitate the best practices of Google, long before they have revenue to justify it. I wrote a satire of how some of these conversations go, which I posted here: http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/my-final-post-regarding-the-flaws-of-docker-kubernetes-and-their-eco-system http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/my-final-post-regardi...