[danenania]

Most startups are at least going to want to be able to deploy, scale up or down, and restart an app without downtime. I wouldn't say that's overkill.

While it's not impossible to do with a single instance, you can spend a lot of time shaving that yak. It's reasonable to pay a bit more to have that stuff handled for you in a robust way.

[0xEFF]

These reasons related to deployment, but there's also lots of value in the security aspects of the control plane.

  * automatic service account for each workload
  * automatic service to service auth to 3rd party services
  * the audit log
  * role based access control
  * well defined api
  * the explain subcommand
  * liveness and readiness probes
  * custom resources

The list goes on, but the big ones for a small team just getting started are workload identity and security.