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.