> Large-scale startups use dynamic-scheduled cloud services in part to reduce coupling between teams.
This is the crux. It's Conway's Law in action. The promise of Kubernetes to a large org is that you can split the baremetal and OS layer into one team that manages everything up to Kubernetes, and then that's the common interface where all other teams deploy their applications into. And besides the team separation, the value is that you have a central layer to put automatic policy enforcement, engineering doctrines, and so forth.
while i agree with you that kubernetes allows you to split the stack down to individual "specialisations", i don't see how this is different with kubernetes compared to "traditional" Virtual machines?
Usually the differentiator is either the container or VM. Everything beneath that gets managed by some kind of operations team (or teams if you are really large or specialized), while the stuff running ontop of the infrastructure is usually done by developers/application maintainers.
This is the crux. It's Conway's Law in action. The promise of Kubernetes to a large org is that you can split the baremetal and OS layer into one team that manages everything up to Kubernetes, and then that's the common interface where all other teams deploy their applications into. And besides the team separation, the value is that you have a central layer to put automatic policy enforcement, engineering doctrines, and so forth.