As someone who has worked in an environment where thousands of machines were being deployed to, this is ridiculous. Orchestration is an area where good tooling makes an absolutely massive difference. Shell scripts are not a good tool for observability or handling rollbacks.
I didn't say orchestration provides no value. I've spent the last 15 years building orchestration systems, I believe in them. I'm merely saying the most value of containers is achieved without requiring the adoption of orchestration. What I mean by that is if you take your existing means of running non-containerized apps, and change nothing except putting your app in a container, you will see a large benefit. Now changing your existing means of deploying application and swapping that out to an orchestration engine such as k8s may or may not benefit you. If you have 1000 servers, you will mostly likely see benefit. If you have 20, you might not.
k8s or orchestration/clustering is not the only way to run containers. Amazon knows that. If I was to make a bet I say that Fargate or Lambda have much better chance of being a major money maker for AWS.
I seriously doubt that. 1000+ servers is a lot. The number of organisations worldwide running that many servers in any sort of coordination must be pretty low. Services (or "pods") sure, but actual servers? Can't be more than a few hundred companies, surely.
One would also think that by 1000-ish servers it's starting to make a lot of financial sense to move out of AWS anyway.
Amusingly, since there are only 200 comments, his statement is true simply by the luck of saying average: multiple companies that comment here are in the tens to hundreds of thousands plus servers range, bringing up the average for everyone :). That said, I'd be deeply surprised if the median was breaking 100. 100 dual-socket servers gets you a lot of compute these days!
