[tracker1]

That's mostly my take as well. I'm a big proponent of having separate teams for ops/deployment/sre from app development when you make the jump to k8s though. There's also a few bridge or in-between options for most cloud services as well.

To me, if there's generally fewer than 10 actual active users at any given time and/or you can easily tolerate 30-60m of down time now and then... I'd lean into the simpler option of docker-compose. While I generally think of compose as a dev tool first, it's definitely useful sometimes.

[globular-toast]

If you go cloud managed (EKS etc), there isn't really much to take care of. I do dev work and even keep a bare metal cluster going as well as a cloud managed one.

Probably needs a real generalist though which maybe doesn't include your average dev.