Not in the sense that it doesn’t work, but in the way it slows people down, adds unnecessary steps, stalls delivery, and grinds simple ideas into ticket queues and approval flows. The potential of cloud-native infrastructure is speed. The reality, for many teams, is friction.
Access to Kubernetes clusters often means wrestling with multiple systems: VPNs, bastions, role bindings, temporary credentials, and security reviews stacked like walls. Each wall forces an engineer to stop, wait, and switch context. Multiply that by every teammate, every day, and the cost becomes massive. Not in dollars alone, but in the momentum it kills.
The smartest organizations are starting from a different mindset: secure access should be fast access. Every delay between “I need to test this” and “I’m running it in the cluster” is a tax on delivery. Reducing that delay is not just a developer experience win—it’s an operational advantage. Security teams get better control when access is centralized, auditable, and short-lived by default. Engineers get to move without asking permission ten different ways.