K8s is certainly a beast and I agree with your posts directionally but just as a counterpoint - as a solopreneur I've been using k8s to run my business workloads (on GKE) for the past 4 or 5 years now. I'm very comfortable with dev and ops and k8s is a force multiplier for me, letting me easily manage much more than I could without it (e.g. due to automation, tooling, community, etc). Building on top of a standardized platform with a huge community has been a big win for me as a solo dev.

I'm not running a very big operation, I only have two nodes which host a few custom webapps and a few dozen WP sites. Running in a single region removes the extra charge for HA GKE, letting me run pretty lean and just pay for the VM, storage and bandwidth. I hardly ever have to spend any time on managing the cluster, it keeps chugging along while I get things done and makes it easy for me to manage app lifecycles. YMMV.

I keep it simple, I tried helm but didn't like it because it added too much complexity. I pull in cert-manager and nginx-ingress to every cluster I run but nothing else. I build my images locally and push to the registry directly, no CI/CD. I focus on the core competencies of k8s and try to stay lean and conservative with adding new tools or components.

This is a very interesting use-case for k8s. Can you expand on it some more? For instance, why did you you pick this over vhosting? You essentially took TESLA's Electric semi-truck, remove the cab, extend the chasis and slap a school bus body on top of it. I think I like it, but I'm wondering how stable it is. how much of set-it-and-forget-it benefit do you get out of it. Sometimes it's best to over-engineer to sleep good at night, knowing the limits will never be tested. This is why XCP-NG beats PROXMOX, because there's less wet nursing involved. Let me know if you have any write-up on this approach that you can share. I'd be interested in reading it.

I'll consider writing a blog post on it but long story short, it's very stable and hands-off when using a managed service. I started off with some DO droplets when I first launched my business and adopted k8s around v1.6. It was a little rough back then but now I spend maybe a few hours a month max on managing my clusters, mostly just upgrading the nodes and core components (cert-manager, nginx-ingress-controller).

I fell in love with it because of the dev and ops experience. Just the shift of perspective from pets to cattle is a big improvement. Deploying via sftp is simple but k8s really helps me with the other aspects (monitoring, logging, scheduled tasks, TLS cert mgmt, blue/green deploys, multiple environments, etc) of managing apps that my clients use regularly and depend on. It's nice having one API platform that can handle all of this and feels more like assembling Lego blocks instead of bespoke solutions for every project.

Hope that gives you some insight!