Kubernetes has come a long way from its early days of container orchestration hype. In this episode, we sit with Hijmen Fokker from Pionative to take a deep dive into what makes Kubernetes so crucial to today’s cloud-native world.

We unpack the rise of platform engineering and the critical shift from everyone running their own clusters to dedicated teams managing infrastructure behind the scenes.

We discuss why developers shouldn’t have to know how etcd works, when not to adopt Kubernetes, and how abstraction layers can both empower and endanger your stack—depending on your team’s readiness.From operators managing stateful services like Postgres and Kafka to the hidden costs of DIY Kubernetes, we get into the real trade-offs companies face when scaling their cloud-native workloads.

Whether you're a CTO deciding how to build your next platform, a DevOps engineer wrestling with Helm charts, or just Kubernetes-curious—this episode will give you a clear, honest lens on where the ecosystem is heading.