Sorry, I could have explained that better. The biggest value add that k8s has is that it gives you as many or as few autoscaling groups as you need at a given t

Sorry, I could have explained that better. The biggest value add that k8s has is that it gives you as many or as few autoscaling groups as you need at a given time using only a single pool (or at least fewer pools) of heterogeneous servers. There's lots of fine print here but it really does let you run the same workloads on less hardware and to me that's the first and last reason you should be using it. I wouldn't start with k8s and instead opt for ASGs until you reach the point where you look at your AWS account and see a bunch of EC2 instances sitting underutilized.