Two years ago, I adopted Kubernetes without proper evaluation. The result? $2K/month wasted and endless operational headaches.

Last month I migrated to AWS ECS Fargate, immediately saving $2K/month while dramatically simplifying operations. This is my lesson in avoiding technology hype.

The Mistake

Kubernetes didn’t fail; I did. As an architect, my job is evaluating tradeoffs before commitments. Instead, I got caught up in industry hype.

Questions I should have asked:

  • Do we need multi-cloud deployment? (No)
  • Are we running hundreds of microservices? (We had ~20 containers)
  • Do we have dedicated platform engineers? (No)
  • Is the operational overhead justified? (No)
  • Do we want non-cloud-native auth complexity? (No)
  • Do we want to constantly optimize node costs? (No)

I didn’t ask these honestly. I saw others adopting K8s and assumed we should too.

What Kubernetes Is Actually For

K8s is built for massive scale with dedicated platform teams. If you’re running thousands of services like Google, it’s perfect. For small teams with dozens of containers, it’s overkill, like using a semi truck for pizza delivery.

Most teams just need reliable deployments without weekend cluster maintenance.

The Solution

AWS ECS Fargate: Fully managed, auto-scaling, native AWS integration. No cluster management, significantly lower costs, dramatically simpler operations.

Similar managed container solutions exist across cloud providers. Evaluate what fits your actual needs, not industry trends.

The Lesson

Evaluate before adopting. Ask hard questions about your specific context before committing to trendy technologies. The boring, simple solution is usually the right solution.

As architects, we must protect our organizations from expensive assumptions, even when (especially when) the entire industry seems to be moving in one direction.