Do I Need Kubernetes?

Honestly nobody needs k8s, but nobody really needs anything. If you know it and you know it suits your needs, then sure! Go for it! Have fun.

If you don't know it, then learn it first. Then you can properly evaluate whether it suits your requirements or not.

There's huge value in choosing something that your team already knows + is familiar with

I'd totally advocate for learning something new, but solving a business problem probably isn't the best time for this :)

I think the article gave a great overview though, and is perhaps a good way to decide what to learn next

> Run your applications in Docker from day 1 (with docker-compose it’s as valuable for dev as it is for production) and think carefully before letting your applications store local state.

I think this is the key take away for many startups. Get it so you:

    1. Have a single-command way to bring up your entire backend
    2. That command can run on your dev machine
    3. You document all of the settings for your containers and deps 

Once you have that in a docker-compose.yml file migrating to something like kube when you need health checks, autoscaling, etc is easy.

The only thing you must be critical of is bashing people over the head to make everything you run in your company run in this environment you've created. No special deployments. Establish 1 method with 1 tool and go from there.

Every company I've worked at I've brought a single command `docker-compose up -d` workflow and people were amazed by the productivity gains. No more remembering ports (container_name.local.company.com), no more chasing down configuration files and examples, no more talking to shared DBs, etc.

No.

Like most infrastructure work there is an upfront cost, but after paying that the result enables you to ship value faster and easier.