> it's solving particular tough operational problems that if you don't know exist in the first place
They probably don't exist for the majority of people using it. We are using k8s for when we need to scale, but at the moment we have a handful of customers and it isn't changing quickly any time soon.
As soon as you go down the road of actually doing infrastructure-as-code, using (not running) k8s is probably as good as any other solution, and arguably better than most when you grow into anything complex.
Most of the complaints are false equivalence: i.e. running k8s is harder than just using AWS, which I already know. Of course it is. You don't manage AWS. How big do you think their code base is?
If you don't know k8s already, and you're a start-up looking for a niche, maybe now isn't the time to learn k8s, at least not from the business point of view (personal growth, another issue).
But when you do know k8s, it makes a lot of sense to just rent a cluster and put your app there, because when you want to build better tests, it's easy, when you want to do zero trust, it's easy, when you want to integrate with vault, it's easy, when you want to encrypt, it's easy, when you want to add a mesh for tracing, metrics and maybe auth, it's easy.
What's not easy is inheriting a similarly done product that's entirely bespoke.
> Of course it is. You don't manage AWS. How big do you think their code base is?
This seems like a fairly unreasonable comparison. The reason I pay AWS is so that I _do not_ have to manage it. The last thing I want to do is then layer a system on top that I do have to manage.
They probably don't exist for the majority of people using it. We are using k8s for when we need to scale, but at the moment we have a handful of customers and it isn't changing quickly any time soon.