I hear a lot of people trying to justify “Why Kubernetes?”, and this is not about the technology but something that I see happening to our industry. Despite the fact that there are a lot of good answers to that question, more recently I’ve seen the same thing that happened to “React” (and others) happening to K8s. To the point where you see articles like “How to run a static blog on K8s”.
I don’t know how to call it, it is sort of a “Tech Gentrification”, where we are trivializing technologies to the point people are making it worse for the real “users”.
From one side I understand that you have learning-purposed tutorials, but at the same time, it leads new users or people starting to understand a technology to learn something for the sake of it, rather than learning from its need or purpose.
It’s like me trying to teach you how to dance by telling you it is a transportation method to go from point A to point B, makes no sense.
We should always share and teach, but also, be conscious of constraints of the “Why” someone would be learning something. Analogies are good but sometimes they could be misleading.
Most companies would be better off using Heroku, ECS or similars, having a K8s is pretty awesome, if you need it. Otherwise, it just causes unnecessary headaches (Trust me, I’ve been there). Not to get into specifics of Kubernetes, because this is about something different.
Recruiting
The problem is much bigger than I initially thought, it affects all parts of the industry, an industry that relies on such technologies to hire, e.g.: I've heard of people being asked by a non-tech recruiter if I had 10 years experience with ... "KUBERTENIS"… *not a typo*. It is not the recruiters' fault, they were just told what to listen for.
I’ve interviewed engineers that would just randomly say “Kafka”, “Kubernetes”, “React” just because they thought that was what I wanted to hear, deep down you could notice they had no clue what any of those were. "I've used Kafka for Machine Learning", whatever that means. Again, those were not terrible engineers, they were just trying to fit...
Once more, the trivialization of the term impacts our day to day lives, when people put their companies or a technology on a pedestal they end up creating this false sense of a “standard” across the industry:
“Everyone is using K8s”, “Everyone is using React”
This feeds the “Fear of missing out” that spreads more and more across people and companies. It makes me sad because great engineers won’t apply for positions where they are required to have "10 years of exp with K8s" when probably only 20 people at Google can say they do…
At the end of the day, there is no magical recipe understanding your needs before adopting a technology is a part of being an engineer. Take it as a warning if you find yourself looking for excuses to use A or B just because … you want it. Don’t be scared of finding out you need it, but don’t worry if you don’t.
What are your thoughts on the matter?