I too have been running single node k8s on tiny $5/mo vps and it works fine. Less than 500MB ram used for k3s. It also takes unbelievably little effort & is re

I too have been running single node k8s on tiny $5/mo vps and it works fine. Less than 500MB ram used for k3s. It also takes unbelievably little effort & is remarkably secure & useful out of the box. There's no intra-cluster permissions setup, but if you're a startup & especially if most devs are leveraging paved-road tools or gitops for ci/cd, maybe just trusting your team is enough, at least for the first years. Metrics, logging, postgres operator, lets-encrypt storage: all just worked. I had https webapps in under an hour. I did burn some significant time writing my own helm charts for dns (coredns & bind), but there were good existing options I would have been happy to use, but I wanted to learn helm & jave my specific idea done this particular way. Then my webapp had great dns integration too! As you say, the whole state of the world is pretty readily exportable & re-loadable. If someone does really goof up, as long as volumes & backups arent wiped out (often shipped to s3 compatible endpoints by many tools), it's bad & there's downtime yes, but the road to recovery can/should be incredibly fast. If you have history over time for backups, be easy enough to spot what changed that made things go bad.