I agree with the idea the post is trying to do but not with the justifications, I think it's wrong to compare Kubernetes vs rsync or ansible, it resolves a different problem, container cluster management, a more appropriate comparison would had been to compare with simpler solutions in the same domain, such as docker swarm or nomad.
I think the whole point of the article is that k8s solves a different problem: orchestrating large sets of images if your application uses a significant portion of a datacenter.
The problems one _actually_ has on a personal projects are indeed solved with simple tools like rsync.
