I guess that depends primarily on whether you're installing and operating K8S yourself. Use something like GKE and it's a very seamless experienced, with AKS getting pretty good and the rest being rather crummy.

Once you have a managed cluster, the deploying apps is fairly easy. A single container/pod is a 1-liner and you can work your way up from there.

That's fair; all of this is heavily influenced by your operating environment. If you can run GKE or if you have an ops team to deal with that stuff, then yeah k8s is great. Unfortunately, I'm part of the ops team, and our company is too small to have a dedicated k8s team and too low-budget to (likely) do well with a managed service (we get absurd value per money out of bare metal servers, which is very much a tradeoff that is sometimes painful). So to me, k8s looks like a very iffy tradeoff. Bigger company, bigger budget, different constraints? Yeah, k8s would be great.

> we get absurd value per money out of bare metal servers, which is very much a tradeoff that is sometimes painful

What do you find most painful about your use of bare-metal servers? The thing that I like most about a hyperscale cloud provider is the level of redundancy, including even multiple data centers per region, and their built-in health checks and recovery (e.g. through auto-scaling groups) based on that redundancy. With bare-metal servers, I'd have to cobble together my own failover system for the occasional time when one of those servers goes down or becomes unreachable due to a network issue. And of course, I'd probably find out that my home-made failover system doesn't actually work at the worst possible time.

I don't know that it's a single big thing; it is indeed many small things that we have to manage ourselves. We backup the databases with our own scripts, we failover manually (I miss RDS), we use an overlay network because no VPC, and deployments involve ansible running docker-compose. There's basically no elasticity; we provision massive bare metal servers with fixed memory and disk installed. But, it is dirt cheap, so we manage, and all the pieces are small and easy enough to use.