> A fast modern 16 core machine with 128 gig of ram can meet a lot of needs.
True, as long as you don't care about redundancy or scalability or wasting money because you actually only use 4GB of RAM and barely any CPU.
> So much kubernetes is just overkill.
Absolutely true. Kubernetes is great in some scenarios, but pretty complex so overkill when starting. Serverless (ideally containers as a service), docker-compose and Nomad* are much better options unless everybody is already a Kubernetes pro that has all the tooling ready.
* - disclaimer, I work at HashiCorp, but I actually believed Nomad is amazing, sufficient in most scenarios, and actually better than Kubernetes in some aspects before joining and it's one of the reasons I joined.
> wasting money because you actually only use 4GB of RAM and barely any CPU.
Hetzner will rent you a massive 128GB of RAM server for ~150 bucks a month. In company terms, that is peanuts and whatever time you'd spend installing and managing K8S is pretty much never going to pay for itself, not to mention the added liability of all those moving parts.
The whole "autoscaling" thing is mostly bullshit invented by the cloud providers to make their insane margins more palatable. A dedicated, non-cloud stack sized to peak capacity will be cheaper than the majority of "autoscaled" stacks at minimal capacity.
>> A fast modern 16 core machine with 128 gig of ram can meet a lot of needs.
> True, as long as you don't care about redundancy or scalability or wasting money because you actually only use 4GB of RAM and barely any CPU.
Redundancy: you want two fast machines. More if you want them in multiple locations, but we still see a lot of people with presence only in us-east.
Scalability: You can go to 96-core per socket on commodity x86 servers now; 16 -> 96 is a lot of room to scale. You can also go up to I think 3TB per socket on Epyc Genoa.
> A fast modern 16 core machine with 128 gig of ram can meet a lot of needs.
Computation is the easy part, you can pick that kind of performance up at your local IT box store.
The hard part, that what Kubernetes makes easy, is the rest: dealing with failing compute nodes, with isolating workloads, writing load balancer configurations, keeping them up to date, setting up and tearing down volatile (=feature branch) environments...
I feel like k8s is the new Linux. It gives you so much out of the box, and you can tap into such rich ecosystem, that the perceived complexity is well justified.
A fast modern 16 core machine with 128 gig of ram can meet a lot of needs.