Absolutely agree. The point of Kubernetes is to simplify operational side. I use it for my hobby projects. There is some learning investment needed, but after that it simplifies things so much. You can use Kubernetes for simple projects that don't need to scale to the size of Google.

In another recent thread, I mentioned running ~62 apps on kubernetes, and people asking if it could be simplified to less.

They are mostly plain old PHP webapps, non-trivial amount of them Wordpress (shudduer), some done in random frameworks, some with ancient dependencies, some in node.js, one was ruby, etc. They are the equivalent of good old shared hosting stuff.

With kubernetes, we generally manage them in much simplified form, and definitely much cheaper than hosting multiple VMs to work around issues in conflicting dependencies at distro level or keeping track of our own builds of PHP.

We also run CI/CD on the same cluster. Ingress mechanics mean we have vastly simplified routing. Yes, we cheat a lot by using GKE instead of our own deployment of k8s, but we can manage that too, it's just cheaper that way.

Pretty much smooth sailing with little operational worries except the fact that Google's stackdriver IMO sucks :)