With k8s you get a way of saying 'WHAT YOU WANT' without 'HOW TO DO IT', and this is applies not only to the actual infra aspect, but the people maintaining it too. Any cloud platform and devops worth their salt can maintain a k8s system. Good luck finding someone to understand what that 'custom Naemon' plugin is doing.
You Kubernetes people get triggered very easily. I was already lucky to have found several juniors that worked in this kind of thing with minimal training. The 'custom Naemon plugin' is 30 lines of bash and you can adapt it to any monitoring system.
Of course this is scary and complicated. I might consider switching to 'Kubernetes operators', which sounds simpler :-)
I think everyone just has to acknowledge that there are use cases for both. Also Kubernetes and "classic" configuration management via Ansible (or others) are orthogonal to each other. So these discussions are somewhat misguided in the first place.
For example: you might want to deploy a VM or auto-install and configure a physical machine with custom tooling and something like Ansible or Puppet and _then_ configure said machine as a Kubernetes node that handles the actual workloads. In other cases some Dev might want to install and run an application without the k8s layer using Nginx as a webserver. In this case, too, Puppet/Ansible might or might not be involved in configure the application but only handle the "OS layer" if there is such a thing. And in yet other cases you get away with a simple cloud-init script that makes your machine a k8s node and leave out other configuration management tools altogether.
Guess what: All of this is fine. Evaluate solutions based on what you need, not what other people working in giant corporations urge you to use. And then go and build it, ideally having fun doing it.
Representing either tool as a one-size-fits-all is misguiding at best and seems to be overly simplistic to the complex problem of deploying your applications.
I am generous in the context for generosity. Turns out that engineering is not about being generous but rather about choosing the most efficient solution for problems that in the end need to be business driven. This requires evaluating requirements, context and tradeoffs. That takes a cold, rational mind more than generosity.
> K8s really does address real problems around deployment and it's very well thought out
It's great where it makes sense. It's less than great elsewhere.
Not everything is SaaS, not everything needs scaling, not everything needs 99.99% of uptime, not everything needs a CDN, not every company is VC backed operating at high risk / high reward, etc, etc. Context is better than ideology. If you read the article I posted you will see that stated clearly.
