I run my own cluster on bare metal. My control plane runs on 3 separate notes over a Postgres db. So that part is as solid as the managed solutions. Thank God n

I run my own cluster on bare metal. My control plane runs on 3 separate notes over a Postgres db. So that part is as solid as the managed solutions. Thank God no ETCD. However, I have been burned many times by keeping critical infra things inside the cluster, so I only deploy stateless apps there. Everything I build does not need storage orchestration, it can just die and pop up elsewhere. Only storage I have is local RWO. No weird CSIs. No TF. I manage my k3s cluster using k3sup with ansible. I use cherts directly (cert manager, ingress…and that’s it). Upgrades are usually smooth (I did go through the whole ingressClass thing). I think all this would be much harder the more abstractions you have. I think k8s alone is peak abstraction so I try to make everything as raw as possible. Otherwise I don’t think any tool can save you besides hiring a full time infra engineer. No tool can guarantee a perfect upgrade path because it will not know how parts of your setup and apps are affected by the upgrade.