I used to have a bunch of bash scripts for bootstrapping my docker containers. At one point I even made init scripts, but that was never fully successful.

And then one day I decided to set up kubernetes as a learning experiment. There is definitely some learning curve about making sure I understood what deployment, or replicaset or service or pod or ingress was, and how to properly set them up for my environment. But now that I have that, adding a new app to my cluster, and making it accessible is super low effort. i have previous yaml files to base my new app's config on.

It feels like the only reason not to use it would be learning curve and initial setup... but after I overcame the curve, it's been a much better experience than trying to orchestrate containers by hand.

Perhaps this is all doable without kubernetes, and there is a learning curve, but it's far from the complicated nightmare beast everyone makes it out to be (from the user side, maybe from the implementation details side)