Since there are so many mixed comments here, I'll share my experience. Our startup started on day one with Kubernetes. It took me about six weeks to write the r

Since there are so many mixed comments here, I'll share my experience. Our startup started on day one with Kubernetes. It took me about six weeks to write the respective Terraform and manifests and combine them into a homogenous system. It's been smooth sailing for almost two years now. I'm starting to suspect the wide range of experiences has to do with engineering decisions. Nowadays, it's almost trivial to over-engineer a Kubernetes setup. In fact, with platform engineering becoming all the rage these days, I can't help but notice how over-engineered most reference architectures are for your average mid-sized company. Of course, that's probably by design (Humanitec sure enjoys the money), but it's all completely optional. I intentionally started with a dead-simple EKS setup: flat VPC with no crazy networking, simple EBS volumes for persistence, an ALB on the edge to cover ingress, and External Secrets to sync from AWS Secrets Manager. No service mesh, no fancy BPF shenanigans, just a cluster so simple that replicating to multiple environments was trivial. The great part is that because we've had such excellent stability, I've been able to slowly build out a custom platform that abstracts what little complexity there was (mostly around writing manifests). I'm not suggesting Kubernetes is for everyone, but the hate it tends to get on HN still continues to make me scratch my head to this day.