Infrastructure was easier to replace than applications https://twitter.com/whenfalse/status/1343258526173433856

This points out the fact that organizations value application dev time more than they value infrastructure engineers.

This shows up in how much they're compensated and what projects get funded

Even with years of Devops trying to level the pay and skill gaps there was/is still a big discrepancy between how organizations value application and infrastructure engineers

Kubernetes has helped change that in huge ways

Here's some of the big ones I've seen

1) Organizations have started to understand that infrastructure has a big impact on their business deliverables.
@jessfraz refers to this as "infrastructure privilege" that FAANG has over many other enterprises

This effect is starting to level the pay scale for app and infra engineers. Because of the way pay bands work this also means you'll probably get a new fancy "SRE" title

2) standard Infrastructure has greatly improved hiring efforts for all of engineering. Even with k8s expertise shortage you're infinity more likely to be able to hire a k8s engineer than engineer for the custom "System Helping Internal Teams" (SHIT) platform you have.

3) k8s has improved application reliability. Not because k8s is more reliable, but because apps finally started using 12 factor practices. /health /metrics etc are signs of apps that are easier to operate and were practically never seen before k8s

4) thanks to application improvements and k8s tooling companies spend less time troubleshooting that doesn't require deep expertise

Did your company have an expert debugger everyone would ask for help? Your company basically paid one senior person a lot of money to retain obscure infrastructure and application information on their head rather than writing it down

By adopting Kubernetes you greatly spread out the debugging knowledge throughout your organization because all of the appliances run with the same interface to infrastructure

This is important because we all know maintaining up to date documentation is impossible

5) flexibility to do bad things

Companies can put microservices, monoliths, databases, or whatever they want in Kubernetes. Should they? No way! But they CAN and that's more important to them than PaaS platforms productivity improvements