[linkdd]

The initial setup (managed k8s + nginx + cert manager) takes 1h top.

Writing a Deployment/Service/ConfigMap/Ingress is about copy-pasting, `helm create your-chart` will even generate those for you, and you only have the values.yaml to fill out.

From experience, there is really no overhead to that simple setup. Our Github repositories each have a CI/CD workflow (github actions) to build and push the Docker images to our Dockerhub account. Creating a new repository requires copy/pasting (in fact, we automated this with a template repository).

We have a repository where all of our Kubernetes resources/helm charts/... live and are deployed automatically when merged to master/main (github actions again). This was setup once and requires no maintainance. We have no need for ArgoCD/FluxCD (aka: divergence reconciliation) at the moment, so this is enough.

Everything else I listed are extra that are not needed for small companies, but can be added later as you scale/grow.

My point is that when you scale/grow and start needing this extra complexity, the existing setup do not need to be changed.