Dear Friend,

This fascination with this new garbage-collected language from a Santa Clara vendor is perplexing. You’ve built yourself a COBOL system by another name.

/s

I love the “untested” criticism in a lot of these use-k8s screeds, and also the suggestion that they’re hanging together because of one guy. The implicit criticism is that doing your own engineering is bad, really, you should follow the crowd.

Here’s a counterpoint.

Sometimes just writing YAML is enough. Sometimes it’s not. Eg there are times when managed k8s is just not on the table, eg because of compliance or business issues. Then you’ve to think about self-managed k8s. That’s rather hard to do well. And often, you don’t need all of that complexity.

Yet — sometimes availability and accountability reasons mean that you need to have a really deep understanding of your stack.

And in those cases, having the engineering capability to orchestrate isolated workloads, move them around, resize them, monitor them, etc is imperative — and engineering capability means understanding the code, fixing bugs, improving the system. Not just writing YAML.

It’s shockingly inexpensive to get this started with a two-pizza team that understands Linux well. You do need a couple really good, experienced engineers to start this off though. Onboarding newcomers is relatively easy — there’s plenty of mid-career candidates and you’ll find talent at many LUGs.

But yes, a lot of orgs won’t want to commit to this because they don’t want that engineering capability. But a few do - and having that capability really pays off in the ownership the team can take for the platform.

For the orgs that do invest in the engineering capability, the benefit isn’t just a well-running platform, it’s having access to a team of engineers who feel they can deal with anything the business throws at them. And really, creating that high-performing trusted team is the end-goal, it really pays off for all sorts of things. Especially when you start cross-pollinating your other teams.

This is definitely not for everyone though!