I am going to say something that will upset a lot of people who have invested significant portions of their careers into container orchestration: Docker Compose is probably all you need.
Not Kubernetes. Not ECS. Not Nomad. Not whatever managed container platform your cloud provider is pushing this quarter. Docker Compose. The thing you used in tutorials before graduating to real infrastructure. That thing. It is enough.
Kubernetes is incredible technology you do not need Kubernetes can do amazing things. It can manage thousands of containers across hundreds of nodes. It can self-heal, auto-scale, handle rolling deployments, manage secrets, configure networking, and orchestrate workloads across multiple data centres. It is genuinely impressive engineering.
Microservices were a mistake. Not the concept itself, which has legitimate uses at genuine scale. The mistake was convincing an entire generation of developers that their CRUD app needed to be split into 47 independently deployable services communicating over a message bus designed by someone who watched one too many conference talks.
I said what I said. Come at me.
Netflix ruined everything This is Netflix’s fault. Not intentionally. They shared how they solved their genuinely massive scale problems, and the rest of the industry collectively lost its mind.
Scrum had a moment. I lived through it, ran it, defended it, and tried to make it work in teams that had no business running two–week theater. In 2025, I do not need another ceremony calendar, another points debate, or another sprint “commitment” that collapses the first time reality shows up.
Scrum is not modern. It is a ritual from a different era that now gets in the way.
Scrum solved a 2001 problem, not a 2025 one Scrum came from a world of colocated teams, quarterly releases, and product owners who sat ten feet from the developers. That world is gone. Today I have: