K8s really isn't about piling up abstractions. The orchestrator sits beside containers (which can be run on bare metal, btw) and handles tasks which already nee

K8s really isn't about piling up abstractions. The orchestrator sits beside containers (which can be run on bare metal, btw) and handles tasks which already need to be done. Orchestration of any system is always necessary. You can do it with K8s (or a related platform), or you can can cobble together custom shell scripts, or even perform the tasks manually. One of these gives you a way to democratize the knowledge and enable self-service across your workforce. The others result in tribal knowledge being split into silos all across an organization. If you're just running a couple of web servers and rarely have to make changes, maybe the manual way is OK for you. For organizations with many different systems that have complex interactions with each other, the time it takes to get a change through a system and the number of potential errors that manual tasks add are just infeasible. Controllers are just one way to bring some level of sanity to all of the different tasks which might be required to maintain any given system. Maybe you don't need your own custom controllers, as there are a huge number which have already been created to solve the most common requirements. Knowing how to write them allows one to codify business rules, reduce human error, and get more certainty over the behavior of complex systems.