Imo, it's basically all about having software-defined infrastructure. If that's worth it to you, use k8s. If you don't mind just ssh'ing to a box and running do

Imo, it's basically all about having software-defined infrastructure. If that's worth it to you, use k8s. If you don't mind just ssh'ing to a box and running docker, or using puppet/ansible or something, that's fine too. I personally like using k8s at work because our dev team is 2000+ people and there's great support for using it in our tooling. I wrote my own thing at home that's basically just a declarative "put this docker container on this host with these options" manager and it's WAY better QOL than when I was using helm and Digital Oceans managed k8s, which is great $ value btw. But Jesus was helm such a pain and at times I was spending more time reading helm and k8s docs than working on my own project. That's my main gripe with k8s. Unlike docker, it is a HuGE surface area to learn, so it takes a lot for that to be worth it.