Why Opinionated Beats Flexible: The Factory Model for Kubernetes

Every DevOps engineer loves options. Ingress Controller? "Let's evaluate Nginx, Traefik, HAProxy, Contour, and the AWS one." Service Mesh? "Istio vs Linkerd vs Cilium." Secrets? "Vault vs AWS Secrets Manager vs SOPS vs Sealed Secrets." IaC? "Terraform vs Pulumi vs CDK vs Crossplane." We call this "flexibility." But let's be honest about what it actually produces: drift . After 15 years in DevOps, I've watched the same pattern repeat across dozens of companies: A small team (1-5 DevOps engineers) starts building an "Internal Developer Platform" They spend 12-18 months stitching together tools Every engineer picks their favorite for each layer By the time it's "done," half the choices are outdated Nobody dares touch it because nobody understands the full picture The original engineer leaves The new hire starts over This is not platform engineering. This is infrastructure archaeology . The Factory Model I started thinking about this differently when I looked at how actual factories work.