- Marginal cost. For those who has existing infrastructure, implementing a first application on a new platform is going to be costly, in part due to the need of educating the employees and maintain two different types of deployments. The need for virtualization will always be there, particularly for organizations using Windows.
- Cost of labor. Traditional server administration is straightforward, routine tasks can be done by entry level sysadmins. The amount of work can be higher, but the price per hour is lower. As Kubernetes is a new technology, there are less experienced specialists on the market, asking higher salaries.
- Unplanned work and the cost of error. As traditional operating systems versions have standard 5 years of support, and decades of stability, there is no need to keep up with the pace of Kubernetes. Errors are both less frequent, and less costly. As a result, less unplanned work and on-call support is required, which is equally beneficial to the employee’s comfort, and the budget.
When considering to implement Kubernetes for enterprise workloads, do not forget to include the above 3 points in comparison of Kubernetes vs L1 sysadmin time to deploy applications and install system updates.
