The other day I spoke to some folks and they were wondering if they should use Service Fabric - Microsoft’s orchestrator. I get it. It powers a sizable chunk of Azure. Microsoft has been successful with it.

First, I was surprised to hear that some people are still considering Service Fabric even when Kubernetes is pretty much the industry standard for orchestration.

Secondly, I was surprised to hear that such a small team finding the platform so appealing. I think they were charmed by the complexity, the power, the bells and whistles, the idea that they too could be like Microsoft.

Regardless of Kubernetes or Service Fabric, I see that often. Developers and architects becoming enamored by the complexity of these platforms - even when they don’t have the problems these platforms solve.

Lamborghini’s like Service Fabric and Kubernetes are accessible and we get excited. We want to say we drove a Lamborghini. But, we don’t stop to think where we need to go and how to best get there.

But if you read the Site Reliability Engineering book, you’ll understand how Google thinks about running production systems and you’ll start to see the ideas that inspired Kubernetes. They want to reduce the repetitive tasks and take a developer’s mindset to the operations’ job. They understand that 100% availability is impossible and the more available an application is, the more costly and less agile it will become.

So, if the path ahead of you is not a highway, instead it’s a sidewalk, don’t take a Lamboghini on a sidewalk because you’ve seen Google and Microsoft racing. If you have a sidewalk, use a skateboard, or a scooter, or just put some running shoes on.

If the application you’re working on will only be used at most 100 times a day and the business won’t lose significant revenue if it goes down for a day, you have a sidewalk.

If you’re using Kubernetes because it’s a green-field project and this is your chance to push new technology, but the product hasn’t been proven in the market and the company hasn’t committed to it long-term, you have a sidewalk.

If the application you’re working on won’t have on-going development for a while and there’s no need to deploy without downtime, then you have a sidewalk.

Kubernetes is more than just another new tool or framework - it’s a platform. You’re going be asking a lot of people in your company to learn a lot of new things. Choose wisely - there’s plenty of new things to learn.