I hate to say it, but yeah that's kind of the point of kubernetes deployments (https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/controllers/de...). Or openshift for more UI and "out of the box" experience.

You deal with all the headache of making your app stateless with a predictable API so that you can reap the benefits of a system like k8s, which can automatically manage all of it for you.

Similarly i'm a bit confused by your comment about SSH dying... in k8s you configure a readiness/liveness probe and behavior when the probe starts to fail. If SSH is an important thing for a given container, maybe the "liveness" probe is the command "ps aux |grep sshd". Then if it dies, the container can be pruned automatically.