"I need X million USD in engineering spend this year because we need to be on Kubernetes".
"I need X million USD in engineering spend this year to fix half a decade of awful technical execution and decision making (that all happened under your watch, BTW)".
Leave that out. Many right decisions look stupid later. It will happen to you to. Time makes fools of us all.
I don't know what is there in the IT/dev industry that compels some characters to quickly whip out blanket accusations of gross incompetence to anyone who isn't them.
This mindset is particularly egregious given that the whole industry has enthusiastically adopted as a best practice just agilying big balls of mud through sequences of quickly delivered stopgap solutions while refactoring and paying off technical debt is seen as wasted effort.
The author of this blog post clearly described refactoring a legacy system that worked reliably in hopes to improve their operations. Yet, here you are accusing someone investing their time and effort to improve their stuff as something that could only be explained as incompetence?
It was a satirical observation (based on my experience) that "the business" tends to scoff at unsexy foundational rework of existing tech. The trendiness of Kubernetes is used effectively to "trojan horse" that kind of work in.
I am jokingly suggesting that at this stage maybe that's the real value of Kubernetes.
"I need X million USD in engineering spend this year because we need to practice DevOps and SRE."
Also, it's silly to just assume that continuing to treat pampered EC2 instances that had to be manually deployed ande cared for is something that benefits a projectsl, specially if the company already shed those bad practices elsewhere.
‘I need X million in USD in engineering spend this year so I can add “I managed a large SRE/DevOps team” on my resume.’