Somewhere along the way, "we need to run some containers" quietly became "so we need Kubernetes," and the second half stopped getting questioned. You stand up a cluster, or pay for a managed one, and now you own a distributed control plane: etcd, an API server, a scheduler, a controller manager, plus a kubelet and kube-proxy on every node, and that's before the CNI plugin, the ingress controller, and the operators. For a fleet at Spotify scale, that machine earns its keep. For a team running twe...