So, my current experience somewhere most old apps are very old school:

- most server software is waaaaaaay out of date so getting a dev / test env is a little harder (like last problem we got was the HAproxy version does not do ECDA keys for ssl certs, which is the default with certbot) - yeah pushing to prod is "easy": FTP directly. But now which version of which files are really in prod? No idea. Yeah when I say old school it's old school before things like Jenkins. - need something done around the servers? That's the OPS team job. Team which also has too much different work to do so now you'll have to wait a week or two for this simple "add an upload file" endpoint to this old API because you need somewhere to put those files.

Now we've started setting up some on-prem k8s nodes for the new developments. Not because we need crazy scaling but so the dev team can do most OPS they need. It takes time to have everything setup but once it started chugging along it felt good to be able to just declare whatever we need and get it. You still need to get the devs to learn k8s which is not fun but that's the life of a dev: learning new things every day.

Also k8s does not do data. You want a database or anything managing files: you want to do most of the job outside k8s.