It largely depends how customized each microservice is, and how many people are working on this project.
I've seen migrations of thousands of microservices happening with the span of two years. Longer timeline, yes, but the number of microservices is orders of magnitude larger.
Though I suppose the organization works differently at this level. The Kubernetes team build a tool to migrate the microservices, and each owner was asked to perform the migration themselves. Small microservices could be migrated in less than three days, while the large and risk-critical ones took a couple weeks. This all happened in less than two years, but it took more than that in terms of engineer/weeks.
The project was very successful though. The company spends way less money now because of the autoscaling features, and the ability to run multiple microservices in the same node.
Regardless, if the company is running 12 microservices and this number is expected to grow, this is probably a good time to migrate. How did they account for the different shape of services (stateful, stateless, leader elected, cron, etc), networking settings, styles of deployment (blue-green, rolling updates, etc), secret management, load testing, bug bashing, gradual rollouts, dockerizing the containers, etc? If it's taking 4x longer than originally anticipated, it seems like there was a massive failure in project design.
2000 products sounds like you made 2000 engineers learn kubernetes (a week, optimistically, 2000/52 = 38 engineer years, or roughly one wasted career).
Similarly, the actual migration times you estimate add up to decades of engineer time.
It’s possible kubernetes saves more time than using the alternative costs, but that definitely wasn’t the case at my previous two jobs. The jury is out at the current job.
I see the opportunity cost of this stuff every day at work, and am patiently waiting for a replacement.
> 2000 products sounds like you made 2000 engineers learn kubernetes (a week, optimistically, 2000/52 = 38 engineer years, or roughly one wasted career).
Learning k8s enough to be able to work with it isn't that hard. Have a centralized team write up a decent template for a CI/CD pipeline, Dockerfile for the most common stacks you use and a Helm chart with an example for a Deployment, PersistentVolumeClaim, Service and Ingress, distribute that, and be available for support should the need for Kubernetes be beyond "we need 1-N pods for this service, they got some environment variables from which they are configured, and maybe a Secret/ConfigMap if the application rather wants configuration to be done in files" is enough in my experience.
> Learning k8s enough to be able to work with it isn't that hard.
I’ve seen a lot of people learn enough k8s to be dangerous.
Learning it well enough to not get wrapped around the axle with some networking or storage details is quite a bit harder.
For sure but that's the job of a good ops department - where I work at for example, every project's CI/CD pipeline has its own IAM user mapping to a Kubernetes role that only has explicitly defined capabilities: create, modify and delete just the utter basics. Even if they'd commit something into the Helm chart that could cause an annoyance, the service account wouldn't be able to call the required APIs. And the templates themselves come with security built-in - privileges are all explicitly dropped, pod UIDs/GIDs hardcoded to non-root, and we're deploying Network Policies at least for ingress as well now. Only egress network policies aren't available, we haven't been able to make these work with services.
Anyone wishing to do stuff like use the RDS database provisioner gets an introduction from us on how to use it and what the pitfalls are, and regular reviews of their code. They're flexible but we keep tabs on what they're doing, and when they have done something useful we aren't shy from integrating whatever they have done to our shared template repository.
> 2000 products sounds like you made 2000 engineers learn kubernetes (a week, optimistically, 2000/52 = 38 engineer years, or roughly one wasted career).
Not really, they only had to use the tool to run the migration and then validate that it worked properly. As the other commenter said, a very basic setup for kubernetes is not that hard; the difficult set up is left to the devops team, while the service owners just need to see the basics.
But sure, we can estimate it at 38 engineering years. That's still 38 years for 2,000 microservices; it's way better than 1 year for 12 microservices like in OP's case. Savings that we got was enough to offset these 38 years of work, so this project is now paying dividends.