Spoiler alert: a well written application on a beefy server almost always beat the k8s rube Goldberg machines on cost. I still don't get why people refuse to think for themselves and just jump on the latest hype train.

K8s makes little sense unless you run on bare-metal. Once you jump to vms you are injecting another abstraction layer and take on a herculean level of ops without understanding what you're getting into.