So my take is that if you're concerned with the expense of 3+ VMs, then Kubernetes isn't for you. We simply run the worker nodes on physical hardware, anything

So my take is that if you're concerned with the expense of 3+ VMs, then Kubernetes isn't for you. We simply run the worker nodes on physical hardware, anything below that is a little weird for production environments, in my opinion. Something like k3s makes a lot of sense for development environments though. It is much easier to create a production like environment with something like k3s than it ever was using VMs. I do feel like there's room in the middle for something more flexible than Ansible and Puppet, but less complex than Kubernetes. If you're just running a few VMs, "upgrading" to Kubernetes doesn't seem like it's worth the hassle. On the other hand, deploying the same application, or applications to say 4 or 8 VMs, that starting to get i little annoying. I'd argue for a tool that augments Docker-Compose, one that understands distribution of applications, but doesn't deal with networking (the network team can handle that). I suppose a little like Nomad?