> You can manage and reason about ~2000+ servers without Kubernetes, even with a relatively small team, say about 100 - 150
Oh wow, so uh... I'm managing around 1000 nodes over 6 clusters, alone. There's others able to handle things when I'm not around or on leave and meticulously updated docs for them to do so but in general am the only one touching our infra.
I also do dev work the other half of the week for our company.
At one job I was the only IT person and we had ~250 plain boring VMs on some bare metal Linux/KVM hosts. No config management. No Kubernetes. I fixed that quickly. There was one other guy capable of taking a look at most of it.
I was also doing the software builds and client releases, client support, writing the documentation for the software, and fixing that software.
I suspect we would have had no problem scaling up with some better tooling. Imagine a team of 150? When people tell me things like that, it sounds more like the solution isn't much of a solution at all.
Managed k8s (GKE/EKS) or self admin k8s? If the former, no problem. If you're building your own clusters on raw cloud or bare metal compute I'm skeptical if doing it solo. Kudos either way!
Hehe, you lack skill in empire building. You know "leading a team of highly motivated team of 50+ devops engineers". The kind of talent that postpones patching until you are back from vacation. Or deploying config change that needs at least two rollbacks before finally going in.
That is actually very impressive :-) We have a small team to just handle the databases, but that's ~200 MariaDB and Oracle instances, and another to do networking.
How many different applications/services are you running?
In any case, absolutely amazing what one person can manage with modern infrastructure.
Oh wow, so uh... I'm managing around 1000 nodes over 6 clusters, alone. There's others able to handle things when I'm not around or on leave and meticulously updated docs for them to do so but in general am the only one touching our infra.
I also do dev work the other half of the week for our company.
Ask your boss if he needs a hand :)