Hi I'm an engineer at Distelli. The "AWS" option is a UI utility. When selecting this option while adding an existing cluster you will be able to easily identify where your cluster is situated by inspecting the Distelli UI under the Clusters tab. This helps users to separate where their clusters are located/hosted visually in the event they are running clusters in multiple clouds (as some of our enterprises customers do).

But that option requests a Key Name. What that key would be? there is no arn identifying a kubernetes cluster on aws. It also requires aws credentials, but if distelli manages the kubernetes cluster, you can't do much with the aws credentials

Only partitioning a new cluster in AWS requires a key name. For adding an existing cluster, we need client certificate and key information. Message us on intercom (the small badge on the bottom of our site) -- We are happy to help.

Could you provides some insight into how an SMB who is using k8s would benefit? Most of the people I have talked to don't seem to think it is worth the added complexity. Do you agree?

For example, they might benefit from the set of opinions baked into k8s. I'm partial to convention over configuration, and I appreciate that there is a "Kubernetes way" you can follow and rapidly have a robust and conventional set of infrastructure. I like that Kubernetes encompasses a pretty large footprint of functionality. For example, I haven't used Terraform personally, but from what I understand, Terraform is not opinionated about secrets management; I imagine some Terraform users are using Vault for secrets, and some are using other solutions. Kubernetes has secrets management built-in, so most k8s users are going to use that functionality; it's one less decision for the team to debate.

Edit: to be clear, there are important things that k8s doesn't do, like templating, that run counter to convention over configuration, so this benefit is certainly arguable...

So much of the benefit comes from adopting Kubernetes in in entirety? As in it could potentially bundle and replace commonly needed operation tools like secret management, etc?

Yes, I think that's fair to say.

I thought of something else rather important: k8s is truly "containers-first", IE containers are first-class in k8s. So it allowed me to get containers in production in a rock-solid manner without being a Docker expert. This is nice if you're seeking the advantages of promoting the exact same docker image from staging to production, for example.

What if your application is not necessarily architected for containers? Have you heard of existing systems being successfully migrated without significant changes in software architecture?

Hmm, if it's a monolith, it should be dockerizable without too much trouble. Yes I've migrated several legacy ish systems. Sometimes you have to take shortcuts and be "un-dockerish", for example by running nginx alongside your app server in the same image, but that's not a big deal really in practice.