To replace Kubernetes, you inevitably have to reinvent Kubernetes. By the time you build in canaries, blue/green deployments, and rolling updates with precise availability controls, you've just built a bespoke version of k8s. I'll take the industry standard over a homegrown orchestration tool any day.

We've used ECS back when we were on AWS, and now GCE.

We didn't have to invent any homegrown orchestration tool. Our infra is hundreds of VMs across 4 regions.

Can you give an example of what you needed to do?

Really? What deploys your code now? I'm SRE, walk me through high level. How do I roll back?

It used be Google Deployment Manager but that's dead soon so terraform.

To roll back you tell GCE to use the previous image. It does all the rolling over for you.

Our deployment process looks like this:

- Jenkins: build the code to debian packages hosted on JFrog

- Jenkins: build a machine image with ansible and packer

- Jenkins: deploy the new image either to test or prod.

Test deployments create a new Instance Group that isn't automatically attached to any load balancer. You do that manually once you've confirmed everything has started ok.

ECS deployments. Automatically rolls back on failure. Not sexy but it works reliably.

The amount of tools and systems here that work because of k8s is signficiant. K8s is a control plane and an integration plane.

I wish luck to the imo fools chasing the "you may not need it" logic. The vacuum that attitude creates in its wake demands many many many complex & gnarly home-cooked solutions.

Can you? Sure, absolutely! But you are doing that on your own, glueing it all together every step of the way. There's no other glue layer anywhere remotely as integrative, that can universally bind to so much. The value is astronomical, imho.