I certainly wouldn't recommend that anyone "focus on multi-cloud" in an early-stage company (unless of course multi-cloud is a crucial part of their product in some way).

Kubernetes is basically an industry standard at this point. It's easy to hire ops people competent in it, and if you do hire competent people, it will save you time and money even while you are small. As an investor "we use this product for orchestration rather than trying to roll our own solutions to the same problems, so that we can focus on $PRODUCT rather than reinventing half-baked solutions to mundane ops problems" should be music to your ears.

I agree with all of that. That said, I don't think competence is a binary proposition, and if you hire people who have only worked at scale they will be calibrated very differently to the question of what is table stakes. One of the critical components of competence for early stage tech leadership is a keen sense of overhead and what is good enough to ratchet up to the next milestone.

As many problems as containerization solves, it's not without significant overhead. Personally I'm not convinced the value is there unless you have multiple services which might not be the case for a long time. You can get huge mileage out of RDS + ELB/EC2 using a thinner tooling stack like Terraform + Ansible.

The overhead of containerisation is mostly in the learning curve for teams that are not already familiar with it (and the consequent risk of a poor implementation). A well designed build pipeline and deployment is at least as efficient to work with as your Terraform+Ansible.

If you have such a team, it can of course make sense to delay or avoid containerisation if you don't see obvious major technical benefits.

But those teams will get rarer as time goes on, and since we're talking about startups, honestly it would be questionable to build a new ops team from people with no containers knowledge in 2022.