we used to maintain our own k8s cluster and it's a pain in the ass given we have no dedicated ops. the cluster crashed every one or two month and we never tried

we used to maintain our own k8s cluster and it's a pain in the ass given we have no dedicated ops. the cluster crashed every one or two month and we never tried making it up to date. I suggest every startup use a hosted k8s solution, which takes care of most things like authentication, networking, monitoring, updating, etc. also keep away from templating system such as jsonnet which is a huge overkill. you will end up writing a lot code you will hate to read later. instead write your own yaml builder in CI, together with parts that do docker image building, and code that deploys the microservices imo Google did a really smart move with open sourcing k8s, as a latecomer of cloud provider. now infrastructure become so insignificant since everything runs on docker and pods.