Holy shit you don't get anything for _free_ as a result of adopting Kubernetes dude. The cost is in fact quite high in many cases - you adopt Kubernetes and all of the associated idiosyncrasies, which can be a lot more than what you left behind.

For free as in "don't have to do anything to make those features, they're included".

What costs are you talking about? Packaging your app in a container is already quite common so if you already do that all you need to do is replace your existing yaml with a slightly different yaml.

If you don't do that already, it's not really that difficult. Just copy-paste your your install script or rewrite your Ansible playbooks into a Dockerfile. Enjoy the free security boost as well.

What are the other costs? Maintaining something like Talos is actually less work than a normal Linux distro. You already hopefully have a git repo and CI for testing and QA, so adding a "build and push a container" step is a simple one-time change. What am I missing here?