Platform Engineering

I write a lot about Kubernetes. I use it daily. I’m a fan. But Kubernetes isn’t always the answer. In fact, for many teams and projects, Kubernetes is the wrong choice. Too complex, too expensive, too much overhead for what they’re trying to achieve. This is the post I’m writing for everyone considering Kubernetes adoption. Not to discourage you, but to help you make a conscious choice. The Kubernetes hype Kubernetes has won. It’s the de-facto standard for container orchestration. Every cloud provider offers managed Kubernetes. Every DevOps job posting asks for Kubernetes experience. ...

I self-host nearly everything. Kubernetes clusters on refurbished mini-PCs. GitLab on my own hardware. Vault for secrets. Monitoring, logging, all of it. People often ask: why? Managed cloud is easier. AWS, Azure, Google do it at scale and reliably. Why put yourself through this? The short answer: agency. The long answer is this entire article. The spaceship thought experiment In my post about the space container thought experiment I describe a scenario: you wake up in a closed container in space. Everything you need to survive is present, but nothing goes in or out. ...