Building one yourself is a good exercise for understanding something, I agree. The problem with that logic is everyone on your team will need to do it, so you'

Building one yourself is a good exercise for understanding something, I agree. The problem with that logic is everyone on your team will need to do it, so you're going to be stuck picking a standard. Should it be yours, should it be mine, or should we both just learn something with a large community behind it? Nothing is perfect of course, but k8s makes a really good target for CI/CD, which is something you want when you're developing as part of a team. If you're not quite a team yet and you don't know how to bootstrap k8s and CI/CD, then you need to figure out when those types of things are important. Probably lots of people could stick with a monolith and a VM for longer than they did, but automated testing will save you a fair bit of time if you're not figuring out how to do it at the same time.