I Didn't Need Kubernetes, and You Probably Don't Either

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Right tool for the job / overengineering

  • Many argue most products could still run fine on 1–2 “beefy” servers or a simple VPS with a load balancer and scripts.
  • There’s a strong theme of “use the simplest thing that satisfies real requirements, not hypothetical scale or résumé goals.”
  • Several note a recurring industry pattern: hype cycles (Kubernetes, React, JS tooling) drive unnecessary complexity that later gets unwound.

Arguments for Kubernetes

  • Praised as a “cluster OS” / platform for running lots of heterogeneous workloads with HA, autoscaling, and standardized deployment APIs.
  • Especially valued where many teams share infrastructure, or where internal services going down blocks a lot of people.
  • Multi‑cloud and portability: some report 95–99% common manifests across EKS/GKE/OKE and on‑prem k8s.
  • Managed offerings (EKS/GKE, k3s/k3d) reduce control‑plane pain; some say a small k8s cluster is easier than managing many systemd units/VMs.

Arguments against Kubernetes

  • Steep learning curve, lots of moving parts, and brittle YAML; easy to end up with an unmaintainable “config spaghetti” if not designed by experts.
  • Overkill for tiny startups and simple web apps; operational overhead can consume engineering time better spent on product.
  • State and storage (PVCs, stateful services) add significant complexity; many prefer to keep state off‑cluster.
  • Some see it as resume‑driven or “cosplay infra,” creating unnecessary jobs and complexity.

PaaS, Cloud Run, and other alternatives

  • Strong support for PaaS: Cloud Run, Azure App Service, Heroku, ECS, Lambda, DigitalOcean App Platform, etc., as a sweet spot for most web apps.
  • Cloud Run is liked for scale‑to‑zero, simple container deploys, and “boring” ops, but called out for nuances: DB connection limits, eventing/back‑pressure, networking/VPC constraints.
  • Lightweight orchestration mentioned: Docker Compose, Docker Swarm, Nomad, k3s on a single bare‑metal box, simple bash/Ansible/Terraform.

Cost, scale, and startup needs

  • Disagreement on when zero‑downtime deploys and autoscaling are truly needed; some say they’re trivial and worth having early, others say they’re premature.
  • Control‑plane costs (~$70/month) are negligible for larger orgs but significant for tiny projects compared to one or two VMs.

Lock‑in, portability, and self‑hosting

  • Debate over “Kubernetes lock‑in” vs cloud‑vendor lock‑in; some see k8s as the portability layer, others note it’s just another dependency.
  • A few raise privacy concerns about public clouds and advocate self‑hosting on colo or cheap providers (Hetzner/OVH) with k3s or plain VMs.