I agree with the initial advice to use a simple Docker container runner hosted service. I initially ran my Django app as a bare Docker container behind an Nginx

I agree with the initial advice to use a simple Docker container runner hosted service. I initially ran my Django app as a bare Docker container behind an Nginx reverse proxy, with a “docker pull; docker stop <old>; docker run <new>” script as my deploy job, and that was fine for a year. Took all of an hour to build the plumbing there. A hosted service would have been just as good and probably even less time to wire up. I disagree with the OOM requirements for operating a k8s cluster. I ran our infra on GKE from 3 engineers through 15 as the primary Infra engineer (while also pushing code and being CTO), and it was hours-per-month of labor, not a dedicated SRE. I trained up some of the other engineers and they were able to help with on call after a few hours of training. For a simple app (a few deployments and services) it is really not hard to work with. All that said I agree you don’t _need_ it at 5-person scale. I would not recommend you learn it if you don’t already know how to use it. But if you do already know it, you can get good value from using it much earlier than the article recommends. (For example I found Review Apps to be very useful for fostering collaboration between frontend and backend engineers, and that feature is not too hard to wire up on top of k8s.) If I had to give one-sentence pithy advice I’d probably agree with the OP title.