To Kubernetes or not to Kubernetes? That is the question

Our team here at SnowOwl.co have heard the idea of Kubernetes proposed many, many times in our careers.

When speaking about it, the value is clear: functional microservice architecture that's scalable, automated, and FREE. In practice however, we haven't seen many companies that aren't huge adopt or operate it particularly well. To us, this says more about k8s than the companies or developers... k8s is tough.

We built SnowOwl.co to enable devs and dev teams to observe, route, and transform their microservices to hopefully avoid having to use k8s until necessary, but we're always curious to hear about the experiences people have.

Have you used k8s before? Why or why not, and in what circumstances would you use it?