I think people overindex on thinking that Kubernetes is about scalability. Honestly, its inbuilt horizontal scaling systems are pretty lacking. Scaling is not

I think people overindex on thinking that Kubernetes is about scalability. Honestly, its inbuilt horizontal scaling systems are pretty lacking. Scaling is not actually K8s's strong suit - sure, you can make it scale, but that takes effort and customization. But what K8s, at base, is actually useful for is availability. You tell K8s how many instances of a thing to run; it runs them; if any of them stop running, it detects that and tries to fix it. When you want to deploy a new version, it replaces the old instances with new ones, while ensuring traffic still gets served. And it does all of this over a substrate of shared underlying server nodes, in such a way that if any of those servers goes down, it will redistribute workloads to compensate. All of that is useful even if you don't care about scale.