Kubernetes migration almost killed our startup. Where we were: - 8 EC2 instances - Ansible for deploys - Boring but working - $1200/month AWS bill Why we migrated: - New investor wanted 'cloud-native' - Engineers wanted K8s experience - Competitors were using it - Seemed like the future 6 months later: - 3 engineers spending full-time on K8s - AWS bill at $4500/month - Deploys took longer than before - More outages, not fewer - Product development stalled We rolled back: - Moved to ECS Fargate - 2 week migration - Back to $1800/month - Engineers back on features K8s is amazing for scale. We weren't at scale. Technology should solve problems you actually have.