> If you're paying through the nose for managed k8s, this is true. If not, you'll eventually need to login to a node and diagnose some issue, which means installing things on the node.

Managed Kubernetes on Amazon (EKS) is quite inexpensive: $0.10/hr * 24 hrs/day * 30 days/month = $72/month. Other costs are VMs, networking, and storage, which you would have allocated anyway. There are some downsides like forced upgrades, but cost is not of them for our use cases.

We incidentally don't ever login to Kubernetes nodes using tools like ssh. It's asking for security trouble to have those ports open.