[b7we5b7a]

Perhaps it's because I work in a small software shop and we do only B2B, but 99% of our applications consist of a frontend (JS served by an nginx image), a middleware (RoR, C#, Rust), nginx ingress and cert-manager. Sometimes we have PersistentVolumes, for 1 project we have CronJobs. SQL DBs are provisioned via the cloud provider. We monitor via Grafana Cloud, and haven't felt the need for more complex tools yet (yes, we're about to deploy NetworkPolicies and perform other small changes to harden the setup a bit).

In my experience:

- AKS is the simplest to update: select "update cluster and nodes", click ok, wait ~15m (though I will always remember vividly the health probe path change for LBs in 1.24 - perhaps a giant red banner would have been a good idea in this case)

- EKS requires you to manually perform all the steps AKS does for you, but it's still reasonably easy

- All of this can be easily scripted

I totally agree with the other comments here: LTS releases would doom the project to support >10y-old releases just because managers want to "create value", but don't want to spend a couple weeks a year to care for the stuff they use in production. Having reasonably up-to-date, maintainable infrastructure IS value to the business.