My team runs a grand total of 1 server, 1 daemon and up to 5 concurrent batch jobs. Sometimes we bring up 1 extra server for experimentation.
It is handy to not break the bank and use GKE autoscaling for the batch jobs. Surely we could setup some batch job manager over some raw VMs, or maybe spend some time to select and learn to use yet-another AWS service.
It is handy to go to the GKE "Workloads" page and see how many servers are currently active, using how many pods. Surely we could pull that off with raw VMs, but it would take me a few minutes extra / a brittle script to pull it off.
Do we _need_ Kubernetes? No. It makes us more productive? Yes. Am I confident that in the next assignment I'll be able to reuse my skills, regardless of what VM provider they use? 90% yes, pending EKS becoming usable.
Echoes of "you don't need C, just use Assembly, it's simpler and faster" from early '90s gaming industry.
