Qovery Blog: A guide for CTO: 8 questions to ask before using Kubernetes
Today, Kubernetes is the defacto standard to run your applications. But Kubernetes is just the start and not the end of the road. The amount of work and knowledge required to have a production-ready stack is huge - leading to wasting your time on in-depth technical details. Your job as a CTO is to make sure your team is spending time on things that matter to your business. At the same time, using Kubernetes is a great way to build a future-proof technical stack. I hope those open questions will help you to make the best decision to build a successful business.
qovery.com
TL;DR You never need to K8s, it is almost always a mistake.
Most needs are solved by global ecosystem of SaaS solutions. Need monitoring and logging, most Clouds provide it (CloudWatch) Need a DB, DBaaS, need Auth, auth as a service, need permissions, IAMaaS (Authress), need analytics (Palantir), you don't need to build these yourself, let alon host them like this.
I hear that Fortnite uses it to host their gaming servers physically closer to their users. They use AWS EKS so they don't have to manage clusters themselvs, and then scale up/down based on usage. #fasterPing Pretty much fully automated via configs.
You can do that with ECS and cut out K8s, it's all the same thing without the extra pain.
For sure, especially for small companies/apps.
my rule of thumb is -
If your company is big enough that you have at least one devops employee that does literally nothing other than work on your service deployment infrastructure, then you can start to consider Kubernetes. Otherwise don't.