Title: Discussion 12 — Kubernetes Everywhere, or Cloud-Native First?
Course: AIINFRA 101: Applied Infrastructure & Containerization > Section: Week 12 — Managed & Serverless Kubernetes in the Cloud

💬 Discussion 12 — Kubernetes Everywhere, or Cloud-Native First? (20 pts)

Kubernetes is often pitched as "learn once, deploy anywhere" — a portable abstraction that works the same on AWS, GCP, Azure, or your laptop. But as this week showed, managed Kubernetes differs significantly across providers: EKS still hands you the node fleet unless you turn on Auto Mode, while GKE Autopilot abstracts the data plane away almost entirely by default. Given that gap between the portability promise and the practical reality, should someone early in their infrastructure career learn Kubernetes first, or learn a specific cloud's native abstractions first (like Lambda + Fargate, or Cloud Run)? Make a case for one path (or a hybrid), grounded in something from this week's material — cost model, operational burden, or scaling behavior. Respond to at least two classmates, ideally ones who argued the opposite side from you.