When Kubernetes Isn’t the Right Choice
Contrary to popular sentiment, Kubernetes isn’t always the right choice for your business. Not every business has a need to adopt Kubernetes, or indeed any container orchestration tool. Containerization isn’t something that everyone needs to be good at, to use, or even to know something about. Kubernetes isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for every problem, so it might not be right for your business.
Now that we’re past the bare sophistry of saying that no technology is a perfect solution for everything, I want to share some observations that have become fairly standard for Kubernetes users and those working in a similar containerized architecture. The consensus I’ve seen is that, especially for smaller organizations, an orchestration tool is a big solution to specific problems; so in some cases it may not make sense to make the investment in it.
Open source tools are free of licensing fees, and running your own container orchestration means you’re not paying a cloud provider for the service. That means Kubernetes is free or very cheap, right?
A recent twitter thread debated whether the cost of Kubernetes was a million dollars. Some low estimates were around $80,000, and others a bit higher. I won’t settle on any specific number, but suffice to say that beyond the cost of hosting your cluster, Kubernetes costs a lot of money because it must be maintained by experts. Both the time and the expertise are relatively expensive in the current labor market.
One pernicious issue is that these costs are often well hidden for executives at the top. Just because your SRE’s, Ops engineers, and Security engineers are run ragged maintaining your new cluster, their stress and extra work aren’t necessarily displayed in red on this quarter’s balance sheet. Without honest and well-informed management to tell executives the upfront real cost of such a team, the focus may remain on the ‘free’ price tag of the software itself.
Surely all this automation means that eventually there will need to be very little maintenance, so the costs will fall — right? There may be some teams out there that don’t have to do much to maintain their cluster, but looking at a ‘troubleshooting flowchart’ that many were sharing earlier this year, I can say that Kubernetes certainly doesn’t erase complexity.
This is not to say or imply that Kubernetes is more expensive than any other option! Merely that it isn’t free and much of that cost is upfront. Unlike a container service like Heroku or a serverless function on any cloud platform, you can’t spend your first year of Kubernetes spending $75 a month and slowly ramping up. To do it right, you need experts and they cost both time and money.
