28 February 2026 · 4 min read
The problems it solves
Many services, many teams, heterogeneous workloads, and a need for consistent deployment across environments. If you have these, Kubernetes earns its complexity.
Bin-packing efficiency at scale is a genuine cost argument — above a certain fleet size.
The cost people underestimate
Cluster upgrades, networking debugging, and the operational knowledge required are ongoing costs, not one-time setup.
A team of eight running three services will spend more time on the cluster than the cluster saves them.
What to use instead, for now
Managed container services and platform-as-a-service handle the common case with a fraction of the operational surface.
Containerise your workloads regardless. That keeps the migration path open without paying for it early.
Where to go from here
If you are weighing infrastructure choices for an upcoming project, the useful next step is usually a short scoping conversation rather than a longer article. Bring your constraints — budget, timeline, existing systems, and the team you already have — and the decision usually resolves itself in an hour.
We run these as a fixed-scope discovery session with a written recommendation at the end, including the cases where our advice is that you do not need us.
Working on something like this?
Send us the brief. We will tell you what we would build, what we would cut, and roughly what it costs.
Talk to us