I read more of the Kubernetes documentation than any sane person should: concepts, tasks, tutorials, the API reference. Some of it reads like love letters from engineers who lost their minds somewhere around the CRD specification.
I came away thinking most startups using Kubernetes should not be using it.
You have three developers, a NestJS API, a Postgres database, and maybe a Redis instance. A VPS running pm2 is enough; container orchestration adds nothing you need. Your deploy script is "git pull && pm2 reload." The infrastructure costs 20 dollars a month and takes an afternoon to set up.
What I see instead is three developers spending two months setting up a K8s cluster on EKS. They write Helm charts, configure Ingress controllers, debug DNS resolution between pods, and set up monitoring for the monitoring system that monitors the cluster that runs your single API. Now the infrastructure costs 800 dollars a month, and setup never ends.
"But we need to scale!" Scale what? Your API handles 50 requests per minute. A Raspberry Pi could handle that. A TI-84 calculator could probably handle that. You got bored and wanted to play with cool technology, then dressed that up as a scaling requirement.
"But we need zero-downtime deployments!" You know what else gives you zero-downtime deployments? Two servers behind a load balancer. Or even a single server with pm2 reload. This has been a solved problem since before Docker existed.
"But we need a service mesh!" Your three-person team has two services that can call each other by hostname. Istio adds a control plane you now have to operate.
The Kubernetes documentation runs to thousands of pages for learning how to run a container. Docker run takes one command.
Kubernetes is impressive engineering. If you are running hundreds of services at scale with multiple teams, it is the right tool. Until you have many services and teams, a VPS or a managed container service (ECS, Fly, Render) will do. Go touch grass, be free. I want infrastructure I can stop thinking about, and Kubernetes demands attention every single day.