For my team, we abandoned k8s because of the insanity of just managing the cluster itself in AWS pre-EKS. Our team has a lot of low level OS and AWS knowledge, and it was just this massive undertaking and at every turn we were told, "Lol, just use Google Cloud."
My employer is all in on AWS, there's no way to change that. Furthermore, our accounts come with a lot of restrictions imposed by our central AWS team. VPCs, subnets, NAT gateways, etc. are all pre-provisioned and we are prevented from modifying them or creating new ones ourselves. The only real tool for k8s in AWS was kops at the time. It was so opinionated that it broke down very quickly when faced with all the IAM restrictions on our user accounts.
Now that EKS is a thing, we're looking to revisit it. But a lot of the pain might be coming from the fact that it seemed that "manage my k8s cluster for me" was under-developed on AWS at the time. Elastic Beanstalk's ECS platform was just the easier thing to start with for us.
My employer is all in on AWS, there's no way to change that. Furthermore, our accounts come with a lot of restrictions imposed by our central AWS team. VPCs, subnets, NAT gateways, etc. are all pre-provisioned and we are prevented from modifying them or creating new ones ourselves. The only real tool for k8s in AWS was kops at the time. It was so opinionated that it broke down very quickly when faced with all the IAM restrictions on our user accounts.
Now that EKS is a thing, we're looking to revisit it. But a lot of the pain might be coming from the fact that it seemed that "manage my k8s cluster for me" was under-developed on AWS at the time. Elastic Beanstalk's ECS platform was just the easier thing to start with for us.