k8s is not really that complex by default, despite all the complexity hype around it (if you look carefully you'll notice a significant number of the people say

k8s is not really that complex by default, despite all the complexity hype around it (if you look carefully you'll notice a significant number of the people saying this have a serverless SaaS to sell). You can run something simple such as microk8s on VMs and get better results more quickly than any manually managed process manager and/or load balancer. You can, of course, make it more complex by piling a ton of stuff on top of it, and most cloud provider offerings do that. But its not required.