My advice is pay someone to run the cluster, and you can use all that time you saved on k8s complexity to operate the stuff inside the cluster and save some mon

My advice is pay someone to run the cluster, and you can use all that time you saved on k8s complexity to operate the stuff inside the cluster and save some money. Features like k8s Operators are essentially professionally-written code that stands in for a human agent that would take actions such as managing DB nodes, renewing certs, and performing backups. If you use mature operators, you can save a lot of money for a bit of effort.