I mean, you still have to invest time on putting k8s to work, get people skilled with it, maintain and debug the problems... If Kubernetes didn't cost anything to deploy I'd agree that using it is the better idea, but it costs time and people, and those things might be better invested in features that matter to the users.
It depends. There are many things that carry a cost early but pay for themselves many times over later. Whether that will be the case for your startup depends whether you end up needing to scale quickly or not.
It's also worth considering that appropriate use of k8s can quite likely save you time and money early on as well. It standardises things, making it very easy for new ops people to onboard, and you might otherwise end up spending time reinventing half-baked solutions to orchestration problems anyway.
> It depends. There are many things that carry a cost early but pay for themselves many times over later. Whether that will be the case for your startup depends whether you end up needing to scale quickly or not.
Well, precisely what I said is that 99.9% of startups won't find themselves in a situation where they need to scale quickly and the only scale problems they find can be solved with Kubernetes.
> It's also worth considering that appropriate use of k8s can quite likely save you time and money early on as well. It standardises things, making it very easy for new ops people to onboard, and you might otherwise end up spending time reinventing half-baked solutions to orchestration problems anyway.
The point is that you might not even need orchestration from the start. Instead of thinking how to solve an imagined scenario where you don't even know the constraints, go simple and iterate from that when you need it with the actual requirements in hand. And also, "make it easier for new ops people to onboard" doesn't matter if you don't have a viable product to support new hires.
You seem to be describing very early stage companies, and if so I agree, host it on your laptop if you need to, it makes zero difference. But it's not binary with Netflix on one side and early stage on the other.
There are a lot of companies in the middle, and following dogma like "you don't need k8s" leads them to reinvent the wheel, usually badly, and consequently waste enormous amounts of time and money as they grow.
Knowing when is the right time to think about architecture is a skill; dogmatic "never do it" or "always do it" helps nobody.
