That is an awesome feature of K8s and similar orchestators. It is however just an HA (high availabilty) problem already solved many times over in many ways. Almost every PaaS system has it. All cloud providers have it. Getting K8s (or any of its competitors) for HA is total overkill.
We use a GKE cluster with dozens of preemptible/spot instances. Great savings for no extra management fee, and with a nice standard kubectl interface for deployments and changes.
VMs are the most reliable thing of any cloud, and often more reliable then their own managed services because of complexity. GKE does live-migration of VMs and Azure/AWS are close to the same thing, so building on that foundation and doing your own "managed" layer via Kubernetes provides a better experience, while also giving you that spot instance discount that you wouldn't get otherwise with PaaS.
Unless you're renting from multiple $10/month services, your service can be only as reliable as your service provider, which is probably less than AWS.
You hit it on the head. Weave Net is participating in the Istio project. I hope they can bring WeaveNet to Istio. That might be able to provide a multi cloud vendor service mesh.
But that’s easily possible – you can use all the French hosters at once. Latency between them is practically nil because their data centers are only a few hundred meters away from each other.
Sure, in case all of Paris goes down, you’re down, too. But in day-to-day usage you can have good reliability on a shoestring budget.
