1.
DAVID LEWIS, PRINCIPAL CLOUD ENGINEER AT STARBUCKS
@HIGHWAYOFLIFE
Stop Caring About Kubernetes
No, not you*, the other guys
*Well, some of you.

2.
About Me
• Principal Cloud Engineer at Starbucks Technology
• 6-year Partner
• IT Professional for 20 years
• Application Engineer, DevOps/Site Reliability Engineer
• Long Distance Endurance Rider (horseback)
• Code and Horseback riding have absolutely nothing in
common.
• GitOps and Kubernetes Enthusiast
• Twitter: @highwayoflife
DAVID LEWIS @HIGHWAYOFLIFE

3.
The State of Kubernetes
• 96% Evaluating Kubernetes
• 69% Using Kubernetes in Production
• 3.9 Million Kubernetes Developers Worldwide
• 113,000 Commits to K8s Github repo
• 85% IT Leaders who agree that Kubernetes is “Important”
• 72% Expect to increase Container usage over the next year
• 55% Expect Kubernetes to reduce their infra cost by > 20%
• 94% Experienced at least one Security incident related to
Containers and/or Kubernetes
DAVID LEWIS @HIGHWAYOFLIFE
According to 2021 CNCF Survey

4.
Kubernetes: For The Apps
• Orchestration and Self-Healing Capabilities
• Scaling and High-availability
• Network layers built-in
• Secret Management
• Storage Orchestration
• Reduced Infrastructure Cost
• YAML: For Ordinary Humans
• But it can be like RegEx:
• Now you have 2 problems
DAVID LEWIS @HIGHWAYOFLIFE
The Selling Points of Kubernetes are the Problems it Solves
This list could be longer…

5.
Kubernetes Got Popular, Fast
• Kubernetes is fun. Really fun.
• Solves lots of problems.
• Oooh Shiny!
DAVID LEWIS @HIGHWAYOFLIFE

6.
Kubernetes and Crossfit
• First rule of Kubernetes:
• Always talk about Kubernetes
• Making a new muscle hurt every day
• Kubernetes is Addicting
• K8s reduces infra cost, but can
increase maintenance and operational
cost, and most of all, security cost.
DAVID LEWIS @HIGHWAYOFLIFE
What do Crossfit and Kubernetes have in common?

7.
Kubernetes The Hard Way?
DAVID LEWIS @HIGHWAYOFLIFE
• Installing Kubernetes prior to Managed was hard.
“Kubernetes the Hard Way”
• Hardest part isn’t Kubernetes anymore, it’s
everything else:
• Logging, Security, AD Integration, GitOps-
deployment pipelines, Helm charts/manifests,
certs, updates/upgrades, managing resources
and workloads.
• Do we really want Application Teams to be doing
this?

8.
Of Application Teams want to learn Kubernetes
*Like most made up stats, this is false.

9.
DAVID LEWIS @HIGHWAYOFLIFE

10.
K8s: Killing a Mosquito with a Tank
• Not all problems should be solved with Kubernetes
• Kubernetes overhead and cost: Operation, maintenance,
upgrades, logging, security.
• App Services (function app)
• Container Services
• Application Platform
• Functions-as-a-Service
DAVID LEWIS @HIGHWAYOFLIFE
If you need to kill a mosquito, consider other solutions

11.
Centralized or Managed K8s
DAVID LEWIS @HIGHWAYOFLIFE
What if we migrate everyone to Shared or Managed Kubernetes?

12.
Centralized or Managed K8s
DAVID LEWIS @HIGHWAYOFLIFE
What if we migrate everyone to Shared or Managed Kubernetes?

13.
Kubernetes Solutions
• There are several ways to make Kubernetes easier to use:
• Don’t use k8s: run, screaming for your lives
• Train all your people to figure it out (come back to me when you’re done; I still might be
alive. Probably not.)
• Hire more people for your team to figure it out (I’m available, hit me up. Ha ha, just
kidding.)
• Hire someone else to do it for you
• Wait longer for results, do more with less, eventually settle on something that isn’t
horrible
• Find a solution that deploys your applications to environments for you and get on with
your actual business of, well, whatever business it is you actually do. Automation tools
and services can help you get your application running without investing in the activities
described above. Someone has to do it, but it better not be you.
DAVID LEWIS @HIGHWAYOFLIFE

14.
Ideal App Development
DAVID LEWIS @HIGHWAYOFLIFE
• Tools like Scaffold allow Engineers to develop
apps/code directly in a cluster
• Development Containers running VSCode (Cloud
Code)
• Engineers could develop code on VSCode in their
browser
• Code is synced to Git
• Git is synced to Kubernetes clusters (This is
GitOps)

15.
Ultimately: Operating System
• Do you think about your OS when you work on your machine?
• Do you constantly have to manage your OS when you work on your machine?
• Application Engineers are most efficient when they are coding for their app, not for
the environment.
• Application Engineers should not be DevOps/Site-Reliability Engineers
• Ultimately we need to build solutions that make Kubernetes as obscure as our
operating system so that the user of the system does not need expert knowledge
in that operating system to make it “just work” for them.
DAVID LEWIS @HIGHWAYOFLIFE

16.
Now Hiring: An Entire IT Department
DAVID LEWIS @HIGHWAYOFLIFE

17.
Okay, but what does ChatGPT think?
DAVID LEWIS @HIGHWAYOFLIFE

18.
Our Kubernetes Journey at Starbucks
• July, 2015: Kubernetes v1 Released
• 2017 Teams at Starbucks begin adopting Kubernetes
• 2019 We build multiple Kubernetes-as-a-service Platforms using:
• Rancher, VMWare, Platform9, later AKS in Azure. Public and Private Clouds.
• 2022 Limited adoption and big learning curve, a new solution is needed.
• AKS, EKS, VMWare Tanzu become the most popular options
• We’re really really good at Kubernetes
• 2023 We’re re-thinking our Container Strategy and building Shared-Managed solutions
DAVID LEWIS @HIGHWAYOFLIFE

19.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk
DAVID LEWIS @HIGHWAYOFLIFE