I find it very interesting that every conversation around k8s turns into a flame war between "just use k8s" and "no you don't need k8s at all". in reality, it is probably more of a spectrum than a boolean value. Also, it seems like people have a different definition on "using kubernetes":

* manage your own k8s cluster on your own hardware: probably pretty hardcore, I've never done this, I'd imagine it'd require me to know about the underlying hardware, diagnose issues and make sure the computer itself is running before managing k8s itself. only when the hardware is running properly I can focus on running k8s, which is also operationally expensive as well. Tbh I don't see a reason for a small/mid scale product to go this route unless they have a very specific reason.

* manage your own k8s cluster on cloud hardware: this seems like a bit simpler, meaning that I don't actually need to know much about running/managing hardware, that's what the provider does for me. I have done this before with k3s for some small applications, I have 2 small scale applications running like this for ~2 years now on Oracle's free ARM instances, I don't really do any active work/maintenance on them and they are running just fine. I'd probably have a lot of trouble if I wanted to upgrade k3s version for large scale applications, or usecases that have tight SLAs.

* use a managed k8s offering from a cloud provider: I've been doing this one the most, and I find it the easiest way to run my applications in a standardized way. I have experience in running applications on this setup for mid-scale as well as multi-national large scale consumer facing applications. Admitted, even though scale has been big, applications themselves have been mostly CRUD APIs, RabbitMQ / Kafka consumers and some scheduled jobs most of the time.

The trick seems to lie in the word "standardized" here: it is probably possible to run any application on any sort of hardware/orchestration combination, and MRSK could be a really nice solution for that as well. However, in my personal experience I have never managed to find an easier way of running multiple full applications, e.g. things that have multiple components such as web APIs, async workers, etc, in a standardized, replicable way.

I run the following components in one of my cloud-managed k8s clusters:
- Vault
- A few Laravel applications
- A few Golang APIs
- Grafana & Loki
- Metabase

Using k8s for situations like this where the specific requirements from the underlying infra is not very complex actually enables a lot of experimentation / progress simply thanks to the ecosystem. For all of these components there are either ready-made Helm charts that I can simply run a `helm install` and be 90% there, or it is trivial to build a simple K8s deployment configuration to run them. In my experience, I couldn't find anything that comes closer to this experience without having a large engineering team dedicated to solve a very specific problem. In fact, it has been pretty chill to rely on the managed k8s offerings and just rely on my applications.

It's a spectrum: there are a billion cases that don't need k8s, and there are probably a similar amount that could actually benefit from it. There's no absolute truth to it other than the fact that k8s is actually useful for certain cases and it is for sure not always "resume driven development". This doesn't mean that we shouldn't be looking out for better approaches, there's probably a lot of accidental complexity around it as well, but we could also acknowledge that it is actually a useful piece of software.

I don't know, I feel like I have to pick sides every time these sorts of stuff is being discussed as if there is an objective truth, but I am fairly convinced these days that there is a middleground that doesn't involve fanaticism in either direction.