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What job interviews taught me about Kubernetes

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Why This Matters

This article highlights how Kubernetes has become a universal standard across companies of all sizes, emphasizing its role in ensuring deployment uniformity and shared knowledge within tech teams. For consumers, this shift means more reliable and maintainable services, as teams can quickly adapt and troubleshoot using common Kubernetes patterns.

Key Takeaways

What job interviews taught me about Kubernetes

So I've been job hunting lately. Reading job postings, doing interviews, talking to engineering teams at like a dozen companies. And I noticed something compared to five years ago when I was last doing this: literally everyone is on Kubernetes now. Every single company I talked to.

Last time I was job hunting that wasn't the case at all. There were basically three camps: the rare Kubernetes adopters, the systemd -on-VM/VPS/EC2 crowd, and the serverless people (Lambda, Cloud Run, etc.).

That surprised me, because where I work we have actual Big Tech-scale problems, so K8s makes obvious sense for us. But a 10-person startup with two services? None of these places were doing microservices or anything close to high scale. So I asked why.

Spoiler: they don't care much about the technical side of K8s.

Why?

A technical interview is actually a great place to ask why, especially when you're talking directly to the CTO. So I did. The answers were basically the same everywhere.

Uniformity

First one was uniformity. Every service deploys the same way. No one secretly knowing that the payments service runs on some bare VM with a cursed bash script from 2019 while the API is on Docker Compose because nobody ever touched it. One way to deploy, for everything.

Standardized knowledge

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