I agree with you completely, we use Kops and see a similar workload. The real boon for us is not in production, where the HA/error-tolerant/easy horizontal scaling certainly helps, but in development, where we can easily bring up ephemeral feature branch deploys as part of the CI/CD pipeline (which itself runs on k8s using Gitlab CI)

Yah.

I mean, k8s has 1000s of features. I am not using every one of them. I carved out the subset I need, and it is FANTASTIC. I get

* Great rolling deploys

* Self healing clusters

* Resource sharing / bin packing (rather than have 20 half used servers, I can have 6 much more heavily utilized servers)

I could maybe frankenstein these features on top of something else.. but frankly it seems absurd. If these are the only 3 features I use to run docker pods, k8s is a HUGE win to me.

You could do the same with AWS ECS

there is nothing special about K8s in your situation.

I do not use AWS

ECS does not bin pack, does it?

neat.

Not available for those of us who choose not to AWS.