I got a Kubernetes survey from The Linux Foundation today and it had a question that asked how Kubernetes impacted my professional life. Good question. Here's my answer:
Kubernetes renewed my love for infrastructure and DevOps! As cloud platforms grew more popular, my job function changed; instead of managing services, I was managing "managed" services. I was losing the ability to actually build infrastructure with free, open source software (FOSS), and I was forced to become an expert in proprietary solutions. I switched to FOSS years ago because the idea of writing software for anyone in the world to use and modify - for free - was really inspiring! When I discovered Kubernetes, I was able to work with FOSS infrastructure again! Once I have compute, storage, and networking from the cloud platform, I can install Kubernetes, and actually manage my own services again!