I've been using a simple circle CI setup and AWS beanstalk on my side, and for the databases I only look for fully managed. I've had a few issues with beanstalk

I've been using a simple circle CI setup and AWS beanstalk on my side, and for the databases I only look for fully managed. I've had a few issues with beanstalk but it still saved me a lot of time, and it's pretty easy to find AWS credits. It's pretty good also to avoid wasting time on SSL setup as everything is integrated (if you use a load balancer) with Route 53 and ACM. Beanstalk uses application version so it's very easy to rollback to a previous version. I never liked DevOps much so this setup works pretty well for me, and seems quite scalable as well. If you're not very comfortable with k8s yet I really wouldn't recommend you to setup a cluster for a small project.