Kubernetes Failure Stories
In one of my ex-companies I worked with, we had a newbie coder who was just getting fascinated by Kubernetes. Unfortunately, every project this person touched would be left half-way by him and he&#x27;d move on to another project.<p>This company invested around $1 million into a very new Saas product that had a lot of potential. Now, I&#x27;m an old school guy. I like systems where I don&#x27;t touch devops. The cost for such Paas is usually high, but it saves a lot of my time, which I value more than money (and it is valuable, in many cases). I advised the management to use something like AppEngine which is freakin&#x27; awesome for such kind of large scale projects.<p>Unfortunately, this newbie coder was management&#x27;s pet. They bit the bullet and went on with his advice to use Kubernetes instead. The system randomly failed, they spent tons of time doing devops and microservices on what should have been a simplified monolith. The development time elongated to almost 2 years. By this time, there were competing offerings in the market for much cheaper.<p>This costed an entire team&#x27;s morale, which lead to missed deadlines and product launches. This lead to many missed opportunities. For instance, there was a HUGE client we were demo&#x27;ing this Saas product. It failed spectacularly on a relatively light load (I&#x27;ve hosted Rails apps on AppEngine that can handle FAR better) and we lost that product and the client.<p>It was still not too late and I insisted on management identifying the root cause to switch to a managed Paas stack given how resource constrained we were. But this newbie coder turned it into a political situation (&#x27;mine vs yours&#x27;). I tried various ways to resolve this, but it didn&#x27;t work out.<p>As a result, I said &#x27;fuck this, I&#x27;m out of here&#x27; and I quit. In less than 3 months of my departure, about 10 people quit including one of the senior managers. In about 6 months, the company shrunk from a double digit to single digit company. The company almost went into bankruptcy.<p>The company lost its $1 million investment. Everyone left. The product development was put on indefinite hold. Finally, this newbie coder left as well. The founders had to rebuild their companies from scratch.<p>Co-incidentally, I went on to become an AppEngine consultant. I&#x27;m able to run unbelievably large monoliths in production, with almost zero downtime for 3 years in a row simply because I chose to avoid devops, and most importantly infrastructure complexity. I pay more, but it easily is worth my ROI. Most of the time, microservices aren&#x27;t required and we can get away with a simplified monolith. And if you can get away with monoliths, you probably don&#x27;t need Kubernetes.