I believe you can get away with much less, but this is something that concerns me as well. We deal with customers that want Kubernetes, but the management plane

I believe you can get away with much less, but this is something that concerns me as well. We deal with customers that want Kubernetes, but the management plane uses more servers/VMs than is required to run their code. There is mini-Kubernetes implementation, but I don't know if they're any good for production. There seems to be a limit to how small you can go with Kubernetes in my mind, and most people never need to cross the line where they're large enough that Kubernetes makes sense. It's honestly a niche product, but right now it's being viewed as a catch all solution.