And people tend to vastly underestimate the power of a single server. These days you can get a terabyte of RAM, 96 cores and dual 10G Ethernet for a low-to-mid 4-digit price (used). Do you need the cloud? Some do, but often your highest conceivable scale fits on one or two servers. Stack Exchange famously ran this way for a long time (until recently when they've been bought by large investors and they're going full cloud and AIshit).

Scaling wasn’t really what I was getting at there per se. Said generalise but that’s admittedly quite fuzzy. Meant it more in the abstraction layer and standardisation sense.

Installing stuff straight on server is very messy especially if it’s lots of different providers with their own dependencies. So you need to do some form of containers or VMs to isolate them. At which point you need some sort of tooling around that. And deal with failures etc. Before you know it you’ve reinvented k8s except with less standardization and more duck tape.

So it think there is a strong case for a k8s cluster but being mindful to keep it as simple as possible within that paradigm. Ie k8s but just the basic building blocks