I agree with the “you are not FAANG” sentiment and I think HN could use the frequent reminder, but I’ve come around on Kubernetes. As soon as you have multiple services that need to talk to each other in multiple environments (staging, prod, etc), infrastructure-as-code is immensely useful. Kubernetes lets you do IAC without tying yourself to a particular cloud.
So it’s overkill for a CRUD app, but you certainly don’t need the scale of Google to find it useful.
Funnily enough most of those pods and serverless functions etc. will likely have magnitudes less available resources than a 5$ instance on Digital Ocean.
That cannot be repeated enough. 90% of the tech flaunted here on HN is interesting only on a technical level, never in a business setting.
I suspect Google released Kubernetes to hamstring all competition. You do not need it. Unless you're Google.