Faith Sodipe of Bauer Media Group UK, ahead of his Nordic APIs Summit 2026 talk, argues against adopting Kubernetes and other complex infrastructure for its own sake. His team faced a data-layer bottleneck (I/O and serialization issues processing near a million events daily) and found that Kubernetes would have added control-plane and networking complexity without fixing the root cause. Instead they invested in observability with boring, proven tools: structured logging via Loki, Prometheus-style metrics with Grafana, and OpenTelemetry tracing for critical paths, plus a containerized service and load balancer, achieving 99.9% uptime. He describes 'infrastructure theater' as adopting tools before you actually have the problems they solve, often driven by status signaling among engineers, and shares how a simple stack has been a positive differentiator with customers though it creates some hesitation among junior job candidates.
