My first and really only experience with Kubernetes was a project I did about six years ago. I was tasked with building a thing that did some lightly distributed compute using Python + Dask. I was able to cobble together a functioning (internal) product, and we went to production.

Not long after, I found that the pods were CONSTANTLY getting into some weird state where K8s couldn't rebuild, so I had to forcibly delete the pods and rebuild. I blamed myself, not knowing much about K8s, but it also was extremely frustrating because, as I understood/understand it, the entire purpose of Kubernetes is to ensure a reliable deployment of some combination of pods. If it couldn't do that and instead I had to manually rebuild my cluster, then what was the point?

In the end, I ended up nuking the entire project -- K8s, Docker containers, Python, and Dask -- and instead went with a single Rust binary deployed to an Azure Function. The result was faster (by probably an order of magnitude), less memory, cheaper (maybe -80% cost), and much more reliable (I think around four nines).