Also, when cost caused by downtime and updates and/or hardware problems exceed the cost of this full time engineer. Even then K8s is probable not the next step.

Also, when cost caused by downtime and updates and/or hardware problems exceed the cost of this full time engineer. Even then K8s is probable not the next step. Simple HA with a load balancer and seperate test and production environments plus some automation with an orchestration tool works wonders.