I think this headline is hyperbole, but also somewhat true, but not for any fault of Kubernetes. I've worked in this space extensively, and have been called in to consult in some variety or another on a number of large enterprise Kubernetes deployments. Nearly universally I found the following things to be true:<p>1. Companies had critical infrastructure for the success of Kubernetes owned by teams that opposed deploying Kubernetes<p>2. The primary person shepherding Kubernetes into the company's environment had not done their due diligence on what were appropriate workloads for Kubernetes and what were not and how applications would integrate across mixed environments when required.<p>3. The principal tech resources at the company were not educated about containerization, Kubernetes, and the intricacies of container networking but were on the hook internally for the implementation.<p>What ends up driving the "black hole of unpredictable spend" is that companies are sold (either internally or externally) on a relatively short migration timeframe, but that timeframe is contingent on the company having appropriate infrastructure, staffing, and no key persons internally blocking said migration. If any factor is out of whack the migration timeline can quickly approach infinite.<p>While it is true that there are startups that could run everything they need for their first 10k customers on 5 VMs w/ Nginx & MySQL that decide to build grandiose environments in Kubernetes they don't need. The opposite is also true, which is that there are huge enterprises who could in reality massively benefit from Kubernetes in their environment but for "political" reasons can't get it done even after spending millions of dollars, so are stuck mired in their "legacy" environments. Networking, in particular, is a huge barrier of entry for enterprise Kubernetes deployments and are almost always stymied by people, not technology, because most enterprises have some Boomer network admin who doesn't actually know anything about networking but only knows about Cisco gear running things.<p>So, what do companies do? They go to AWS or GCP and they just run up a /massive/ bill, as they very very slowly migrate (often rewrite) their legacy systems to the cloud. This is of course astronomically and unnecessarily expensive, but it's generally not the fault of the underlying technology. AWS and Google are happy to bilk major enterprises as well, and often sell them a bill of goods they can't deliver on.