Hell no, I remember managing hundreds of virtual machines in datacenters & cloud, using Ansible and a myriad of other tooling. It's nice when you're at a smal

Hell no, I remember managing hundreds of virtual machines in datacenters & cloud, using Ansible and a myriad of other tooling. It's nice when you're at a small scale and you don't have a lot of people making changes, but over time as it grows the pain grows with it unless you've enforced a consistent cattle model. The longer VMs live with custom changes/code and updates over time the more brittle they can become. Part of the cattle model is so that you can recreate/rebuild when changing code so things stay consistent. The drift from infrastructure as code can be scary otherwise. With the cattle model you need to have pipelines in place to build new VM images for infrastructure updates (packer etc), have multiple APIs to hit (easier in cloud) to upload images and serve them in a non damaging way. (HA deployments/rollouts/dealing with load balancers) It's certainly a non-trivial amount of work. With Kubernetes, a lot of this tooling comes out of the box. You've got autoscaling, load balancing, health-checks, limits/requests, failure mitigation, service mesh options. On top of that it's served in a strict semi-consistent way. Good luck replicating that with virtual machines without a lot of tooling and effort. If you can learn the Kubernetes tooling it can do a lot for you. However I agree that not all setups need it, a lot of times small setups never grow and that's ok a few virtual machines aren't that big of a deal. We still use virtual machines for workloads that aren't container friendly, and to be honest these days I abhor it, even with pipelines in place.