I think just running a process and exposing a port is fine, but the second you get into running a bunch of services together, or caring about environments, the

I think just running a process and exposing a port is fine, but the second you get into running a bunch of services together, or caring about environments, the k8s abstraction is simpler. In the last 6 months my job has been to get production ready vault instances on azure. There's a bunch of complex, unreliable and not very fun APIs here. Much like AWS, there isn't really a StatefulSet ( PetSet ) abstraction. To you need to write a bunch of bespoke logic where you figure which IP addresses, names, IDs, and Disks you need to attach to a new VM. Whilst iterating, the azure APIs are eventually consistent that cause all sort of niggly problems. Resources that are created don't get added to TF when there's a failure. I create a new vault on a PR and it takes 20 minutes to deploy. The problem took a couple of months and I created a bunch of code. On k8s I can just deploy the helm chart in 2 minutes. The abstractions are cleaner, it's more reliable, and way more fun. At the end of the azure project, the team agreed to do a AKS poc, where we gave the task to the junior of the team, and the entire thing was done in a week. If you're not doing this type of work, maybe you don't need k8s. But if you're not doing ephemeral test environments, do you actually not see them as a positive, or is it an effort thing? Because it takes me no real effort.