For some teams, Kubernetes is the new hotness, a must-have — either because of bottom-up pressure (developers want to play with cool tech) or from top-down — because your CIO heard that it will solve all your problems. You may not actually need Kubernetes.
It turns out that just moving an existing solution to the cloud doesn’t automatically fix inherent issues in its design (who would have known?) There are however some benefits, so let’s look at a stepped approach to technology vs complexity.
Move to the cloud
On the continuum, moving some applications to the cloud can leverage benefits without a large up-front investment.
My complexity rating level is: low to average.
Pros:
Easy to get redundancy and cheap to start — compare the up-front cost of 10 EC2 instances vs 2x Dell PowerEdge servers.
Elastic capacity means it’s easier to handle spikes and simple to bring on new hardware
Managed services, dashboards for visibility and built-in compliance for SSO/audit trail
Cons:
Unpredictable spend, many SaaS services start low and ramp up exponentially, according to usage
Requires expertise in cloud automation, often using…
