We're moving away from Kubernetes because managing even a simple implementation is a full-time job. Obviously Kubernetes is meant for enterprises, but I've seen seed round/series A startups with a small engineering team using it. We were at a crossroad. Either we hire an SRE that has extensive kubernetes experience for $130K/year or we move to a managed platform until we actually need those capabilities. We're happy…
In my experience, Kubernetes is a lot of work to install and maintain. However, I've found managed offerings—especially ones like Azure that actually abstract away the complexity (Amazon exposes all the nitty-gritty, in my experience)—make it easy to use for even smaller shops. Of course, not every workload benefits from the features k8s provides.
I think AWS hamstrings kubernetes still bc it is holding onto ECS. Hopefully they see the light soon, beef it up and make it equal to AKS/GKE. At least make masters/control plane free...ugh