Platform · 2014–now · Cloud Scale
Kubernetes
Container orchestration that became the cloud's OS. Overkill for many; unavoidable for many others.
Why Kubernetes stuck
Kubernetes stuck because multi-team platform groups needed a lingua franca more than simplicity. It is complex because the problem is complex — but many shops bought complexity without the scale. Still the default when cloud-native is a job title.
Case studies
- Big-bang microservices cutover weekend — Weekend cutover rollback; months of dual-run and incident debt
- Mid-market CRUD shop splits into forty repos — 3× infra spend; velocity flat for two years
- Service mesh before the traffic arrived — Platform team of six; product incidents from mesh misconfig outpaced actual load issues
Patterns
Compare with
Related
Platform · 2013–now
Docker / Containers
Ship the environment with the code. The packaging unit of modern compute.
Architecture · 2012–2023
Microservices Everywhere
Independent deployability as religion. Correct for some; ruinous cargo-cult for most. Consolidation and monolith return are the 2020s epilogue.
$ Teams split 4-person products into 40 services, then hired SREs to babysit the mesh. Many later consolidated — after years of distributed tracing invoices and on-call trauma. See case studies on premature microservices and big-bang cutovers for named failure modes.
Platform · 2014–now
Terraform
Declarative infra with state files everyone learns to fear. The closest thing to versioned datacenters — then BSL and OpenTofu.