biggest lie in the tech world of the last 5-6 years is: “Put your app on Kubernetes and it will do the rest.” Those who take the stage at the conferences will tell you how “self-healing” Kubernetes (K8s) is and an amazing orchestration tool. But no one tells you about the cost of the army of engineers it takes to run that orchestra.
The sad truth is that you are not Google. You probably don't have Google's scaling problems either. But because of “FOMO” (fear of being left behind) in the industry, you try to manage even a simple website with a system of nuclear submarine control panel complexity. Let's take a look at this “YAML hell” invisible bill.
1. “Day 2" Operations: The Dream Is Over, The Reality Begins
Getting the Kubernetes cluster up is the easy part (“Day 1"). The main nightmare begins with the “Day 2" operations. Keeping the Cluster up to date, managing certificate rotations, version incompatibilities, and crashing Nodes...
- Human Resource Cost: Managing K8s is a full-time job in itself. Is it your developers' job to write code, or to debug why Ingress Controller isn't routing traffic ?
- Abstraction Leak: They say K8s hardware is abstract but it's a lie. The moment you set CPU limits (`requests` and `limits`) incorrectly, your application silently dies with the error “oOMKilled” (Out of Memory ).
- Networking: Communication between PODs, Service Mesh, CNI plugins... A simple HTTP request can suddenly turn into an intractable network engineering problem .
2. Resume Driven Development
When I enter a company as a skeptical expert, the first thing I look at is: Was this architecture imposed by the requirement of the job, or is it the desire of engineers to write “Kubernetes Expert” on their CVs?
If your application fits into a single virtual server (VM) and you divide it into a K8s cluster of 3 nodes, the only thing you solve isyour ego, not the technical problem.
3. Vulnerabilities Caused by Complexity
Complexity is the number one enemy of security. Kubernetes' default settings are usually “work-oriented”, not “safe”
. Runninga Docker container with root authority, bypassing secrets management (etcd encryption), or incorrectly configured RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) rules... For hackers, K8s is an amusement park when configured incorrectly. To ensure the safety of the K8s, you need extra tools (trivy, falco, etc.) and extra time to manage them
.4. When is K8s, When is PaaS?
So, should we throw Kubernetes away? No. Let's just find the right nail.
- Microservice Hell: If you really have 50+ microservices to manage, and they talk intensely to each other, the K8s is a savior.
- Monolithic Applications: If you have a monolithic application, Dockerizing it and running it on a simple PaaS (Heroku, DigitalOcean App Platform, etc.) or a managed Container Service (AWS ECS) will cost you 80% less operational load.
- Hybrid Cloud: If you really want to escape Vendor Lock-In and run your application the same way everywhere (on-PREM, AWS, Azure), K8s is the standard.