<p>Hoping that there is some good insight into how to handle orchestration amount microservices in an on prem smaller company environment. Currently, the systems that we are looking to convert from monolithic to microservices like the rest of the world :).</p>

<p>The problem I'm having with as an architect, is justifying the big learning curve and server requirements with the resources we have at the moment. I can easily see us having 50ish microservices, which I feel could be on that line of using kubernetes or not. </p>

<p>The thing is, if we don't, how do we monitor if it is on-prem. We do use Azure Devops, so I'm wondering if this would safice for deployment parts.</p>

<p>Thanks! </p>

<p>This comes down to a debate over essential vs accidental complexity. The verdict is in from companies that k8s strikes a good balance vs swarm and other orchestrators are barely talked about in the industry.</p>

<p><a href="https://www.reactiveops.com/blog/is-kubernetes-overkill" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.reactiveops.com/blog/is-kubernetes-overkill</a></p>

<p>The platforms that build on kubernetes are still emerging to offer a simpler interface for those wanting a higher level of abstraction but aren't mature enough yet. GKE offers a very easy way to just deal with workloads, AKS is still maturing so you will likely face some bugs but it is tightly integrated with Azure Devops. </p>

<p>Microsoft is all-in on k8s although their on-prem offering doesn't seem fully fledged yet. GKE on-prem and Openshift 4.1 offer fully managed on-prem (if using vSphere) for list price of $1200/core/year. <a href="https://nedinthecloud.com/2019/02/19/azure-stack-kubernetes-cluster-is-not-aks/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://nedinthecloud.com/2019/02/19/azure-stack-kubernetes-cluster-is-not-aks/</a></p>

<p>Other ways of deploying on prem are emerging so long as you're comfortable with managing the compute, storage and network yourself. Installing and upgrading are becoming easier (see e.g. <a href="https://github.com/kubermatic/kubeone" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://github.com/kubermatic/kubeone</a> which builds on the cluster-api abstraction). For bare metal ambitious projects like talos are making k8s specific immutable OSes (<a href="https://github.com/talos-systems/talos" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://github.com/talos-systems/talos</a>).</p>

<p>AWS is still holding out hope for lock-in with ECS and Fargate but it remains to be seen if that will succeed.</p>
