The container orchestrator landscape

Having lived some of the issues with maintaining an inhouse distribution of kubernetes (non-certified), I would agree with the shifting sands analogy.

It's quite frustrating to go from the infrastructure world of VMs, which are extremely backwards and forwards compatible, to kubernetes, where the necessary major upgrades every few months will break several deployment pipelines, or deprecate APIs, or do various other things that require your clients to endlessly scramble to 'keep up'. And you're right, it's usually to do with network requirements (or sometimes storage which is somewhat related to network design anyway).

Committing to deployment on k8s is a commitment to a much higher degree of required ongoing updates for and probably unexpected issues with deployment than I'm used to with for example virtual machine orchestration. Unless you're at a certain and very large size I have come to think it's not worth it at all.