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Like everything in tech, it's all about tradeoffs and understanding how you want to scale your business. Of the three startups I've been at, 2 of them adopted k
by abuani 2y ago
Like everything in tech, it's all about tradeoffs and understanding how you want to scale your business. Of the three startups I've been at, 2 of them adopted k8s early on and 1 of which didn't. Of the two that adopted k8s, one I would say k8s was our key differentiator in terms of our GTM motion and how our platform powered the business. $MM customer needs a setup running as close to their current infra's region for just about any reason, yeah sure we can spin that up in a week. This was often the key bit that allowed us to take customers from our key competitors before the competitor even knew we were in play. The 2nd one..... giant waste of money that gave me a decent pay check.
The third startup that opted _not_ to adopt k8s is stuck at $100M in revenue and can't land customers fast enough to offset churn. This is entirely because the COO has held the mentality "k8s bad, amirite?" and stuck with a patchwork of ansible scripts to manage configuring VM farms that ran our stack. Years of tech debt piled up and every new $MM customer coming in that needs to run in a specific region for $reasons, takes 6 months to setup and cost so much that we'd lose money on the deal. I genuinely believe this startup would be closer to $500M in revenue in the years since I've left had they invested in migrating from containers running in VM's to k8s. But instead they had to lay off 30% of their staff and get another round of funding, and are stagnating.
- GiorgioG 2y agoYou don’t need k8s to scale. Can you make other poor choices? Sure.
- Alupis 2y agoI have found that people who are adamant haters of k8s, usually truly do not understand k8s or the issues it solves. It's not for everyone - but having a knee-jerk allergic reaction to anything k8s is silly. That said - k8s isn't just about scaling, or for "web scale" companies. If you are a person that believes that, it means you are the type of person I am talking about.
- GiorgioG 2y agoI don’t hate k8s, I hate that everyone blindly adopts it without understanding the complexity it adds. I understand it well enough to know YAGNI for most applications. Get over yourself, just because you disagree with me doesn’t mean I’m stupid.
- Alupis 2y agoIt seems you don't really understand it at all. That's the problem.
- SSLy 2y agoNB, did the first company manage their own k8s clusters, or used cloud provider's controllers?