Earlier quoted context omitted.
With many apps, you can completely bypass kubernetes entirely and just use something like elastic beanstalk or heroku for scaling (just by adding more nodes behind a load balancer).
I invested several days setting up my product's backend on Elastic Beanstalk. After several weeks, I learned that Elastic Beanstalk is not reliable. Then I spent several days learning Kubernetes and gave up when I learned that it is overly complex and mostly undocumented. Then I wasted a week using Packer to build EC2 AMIs and deploy with terraform and run with supervisord. I learned that Packer is slow and Linux pac…
My company has been using it to host our production infrastructure for over a year and a half now, and it has been performing excellently. Our site reliability over the past year has been somewhere around the 99.99% range (and few outages we did have were not related to Elastic Beanstalk in any way).
We have our site hosted in multiple redundant physical locations (AWS regions), with a load balancer routing requests between multiple nodes.
We do about 10-20 deploys to production on a daily basis, with zero downtime. Any time there is a deployment, the code is automatically deployed in rolling batches, and the nodes aren't added back to the load balancer until they pass their health checks.