When container orchestration is worth the effort

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Container orchestration is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Operability is a feature, and it has to be built rather than bought. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

When it is worth it

Orchestration solves real problems and creates new ones. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not.

How to decide

Understand what breaks before you depend on it. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

The short version

Cloud work rewards teams who automate early and punishes teams who click through consoles. Three things worth confirming about container orchestration before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Most small teams need far less of it than they deploy — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.