I was managing a database cluster that served 30% of the population of my entire country. We rarely needed to restart the hosts or database service (maybe once

I was managing a database cluster that served 30% of the population of my entire country. We rarely needed to restart the hosts or database service (maybe once in every two years), and even if we had the failover process took minutes and it was automated. Without Kubernetes. Nowadays people often think that Kubernetes is the only answer for scalability and automation problems. As the matter of fact we had another product that was running on Kubernetes, they are now migrating off from it, turned out that the old school approach with bare EC2 instances, Ansible, Terraform and Packer is much more reliable, scalable and cost effective than Kubernetes. I have to add that yes, we had to write some custom tools, but it was way less effort than managing a K8S cluster and all the software/operators/controllers that are needed for running your workload on it.