You can get away without an orchestrator right up until about when your ARR hits $10mm
Hiring people with k8s experience in 2022 is not a difficult task, it's not an obscure technology anymore, and when your initial crop of devops decides to leave, the new guys coming in can scan your deployments and namespaces and pretty much hit the ground running within 48-72 hours. That's a big, important part of running a business. Being able to hire people with the right skill set, and being able to keep the lights on.
Bespoke systems built on top of EC2 require time, extra documentation and a steep learning curve, not to mention the fact that the bespoke system probably isn't getting security audits or being built to modern standards or best practices, tooling isn't being kept up to date. I can build a mechanical wristwatch in my garage, but if I had full access to the Rolex factory floor for free, I'd probably take that option.
I just came out of a project where Kubernetes performance issues involved wild guess and blind tuning until the so called experts actually found out why the cloud cluster was behaving strangely, including support from Cloud vendor.
And good luck making sense of all the YAML spaghetti available for bootstrapping the whole cluster from scratch.
If your devops guys are struggling, you are hiring the wrong devops folks, or at the wrong end of the pay band. Most devops guys I know are paid in the same band as a senior developer.
Sure, it is like bug free C code. It is only a matter of having the top of the cream. Pity there aren't enough of them in the world, including on cloud vendor support team.
Hiring people with k8s experience in 2022 is not a difficult task, it's not an obscure technology anymore, and when your initial crop of devops decides to leave, the new guys coming in can scan your deployments and namespaces and pretty much hit the ground running within 48-72 hours. That's a big, important part of running a business. Being able to hire people with the right skill set, and being able to keep the lights on.
Bespoke systems built on top of EC2 require time, extra documentation and a steep learning curve, not to mention the fact that the bespoke system probably isn't getting security audits or being built to modern standards or best practices, tooling isn't being kept up to date. I can build a mechanical wristwatch in my garage, but if I had full access to the Rolex factory floor for free, I'd probably take that option.