Yuck. We blew a ton of money and time, despite a great infra/hpc/etc team (PhD, exGoogle, exNetflix, ex-scale video, etc), on a skilled but overambitious infra subteam where we should have (and ended on) docker / compose. K8s makes sense if you have a ton of servers or scale or devs, and want to pay employees and team in perpetuity to focus on it, but for half the folks out there, stick with the pieces or you have the cost of openstack and no better off for the increment over just a few of the pieces you can carve out without k8s itself.
The article that leadership needs, vs vendor / fanboy bullshit, is "only do k8s if you have these exact scale and ops problems and your stack looks exactly like this and your entire app team looks like this and you have fulltime k8s people now and forever, and you are willing to tax each team member to now deal with k8s glue/ops/perf problems, and xyz other things , otherwise if any of these simplifying or legacy assumptions apply, perfect: you get to focus on these way faster and cheaper agile orchestration options and actions".
The article that leadership needs, vs vendor / fanboy bullshit, is "only do k8s if you have these exact scale and ops problems and your stack looks exactly like this and your entire app team looks like this and you have fulltime k8s people now and forever, and you are willing to tax each team member to now deal with k8s glue/ops/perf problems, and xyz other things , otherwise if any of these simplifying or legacy assumptions apply, perfect: you get to focus on these way faster and cheaper agile orchestration options and actions".