Tech Radar · caution
Kubernetes for small teams
A platform team's tool. For three engineers it quietly becomes a second job.
- Ring
- caution
- What that means
- Wary — avoiding by default.
- Movement
- Avoid
Kubernetes for small teams is a platform team’s tool. It’s genuinely good at what it does — bin-packing, rolling deploys, self-healing — but all of that comes with an operational surface that assumes someone’s job is to own the cluster.
For three engineers it quietly becomes a second job: upgrading the control plane, debugging a CNI plugin at 1am, understanding why a pod is stuck in CrashLoopBackOff for reasons that have nothing to do with the application. None of that time goes toward the product.
A managed container platform, or even a couple of well-configured VMs behind a load balancer, gets a small team 90% of the benefit without the second job. I’d revisit this the day a team has either a dedicated platform engineer or a genuine multi-region, multi-team scaling problem.