[sph]

k8s is fine. It's the ecosystem around it that I dread.

I understand how it works, it makes sense, but then you're faced with Helm, kustomize, jsonnet and a lot of bullshit just to have minimal and reproducible templating around YAML. Or maybe you should use Ansible to set it up. Maybe instead try ArgoCD. Everybody and their dog is an AWS or GCP evangelists and keep trying to discourage you from running it outside of the blessed clouds. If anything breaks you're told you're stupid and that's what you get, and I should've paid someone else to manage it.

It feels like everybody is selling you something to just manage the complexity they have created. This is what keeps me away. It's insane.