From my experience, deploying to a k8s cluster managed by someone else is extremely simple and straightforward. Tell it which container to run and off it goes. You get zero-downtime rolling deploys, automatic restarts on crashes, easy rollbacks, service discovery (if you have multiple services) and more for free.

Managing a cluster is the tricky part of k8s but just running your stuff on an existing cluster is extremely straightforward. I could definitely see the attraction of a cheap managed k8s cluster with a single node. Maybe hosted k3s or something.

A ton of the value from k8s is in the programmatic and replicable configuration. 1 computer pets are still bad in a mom and pop shop. 1 computer livestock is still better.

Is “1 computer livestock” even possible?

After your single cattle is murdered, the next one has to be raised right?

State has to come from somewhere. Downtime has a cost for most businesses.

In this case the state can come from a centrally managed k8s controller. Something that most cloud providers provide and have good SLAs on.

Kubernetes just makes that story so much simpler. Heck a good cloud provider can just handle any machines fucking up automatically without any human intervention on your side.

The same can't be said for a single machine.

Downtime has cost.

But being able to blow away a k8s node and bring it back up in 2 minutes (or have k8s auto-spawn a replacement node) is WAY faster than having to reinstall wordpress, reinstall nginx, set IP addresses, fiddle with your DNS, restore a database from a backup, etc, etc, etc.

Not to mention everything you have to do to get a machine to parity with Kubernetes--set up SSH, process management, monitoring, logging, etc. I don't think I'd go so far as to say Kubernetes is the right tool for this use case, but I certainly empathize with the sentiment.

so... for a small cluster then it's like aws beanstalk, right? rolling deployments, load balancing, etc. all for free.

Well, in this case the pop is me, and I know k8s but I don't want to invest 15-35 / month on a side project but would still rather have a decently managed site rather. I don't want to go back to FTP crap at this point.

A car is a hugely complicated machine and I'm sure in the 1910s people said only some people will ever need them. Bad analogy considering cars kill lots of people but take that part out :)