There are differences across vendors, but there’s a way to build with k8s where the benefit far outweighs the cost.

We run a bunch of services in two very different cloud vendors (one of which used to be DIYed with kubeadm), and also on dev machines with k3s. Takes a while to figure this out and to draw the kustomize boundaries in the right place, but once you do, it’s actually really nice.

Two things work in our favor:

- we’ve been at this for around 8 years, so we didn’t have to deal with all the gotchas at once

- we aggressively avoid tech that isn’t universal (so S3 is OK, but SQS or DynamoDB is not; use haproxy instead of ingress controllers; etc)