So you build an insecure version of nomad/kubernetes and co?

If you do anything professional, you better choose proven software like kubernetes or managed kubernetes or whatever else all the hyperscalers provide.

And the complexity you are solving now or have to solve, k8s solved. IaC for example, Cloud Provider Support for provisioning a LB out of the box, cert-manager, all the helm charts for observability, logging, a ecosystem to fall back to (operators), ArgoCD <3, storage provisioning, proper high availability, kind for e2e testing on cicd, etc.

I'm also aways lost why people think k8s is so hard to operate. Just take a managed k8s. There are so many options out there and they are all compatible with the whole k8s ecosystem.

Look if you don't get kubernetes, its use casees, advantages etc. fine absolutly fine but your solution is not an alternative to k8s. Its another container orchestrator like nomad and k8s and co. with it own advantages and disadvantages.

It's not a k8s replacement. It's for the small dev team with no k8s experience. For people that might not use Docker Swarm because they see it's a pretty dead project. For people who think "everyone uses k8s", so we should, too.

I need to run on-prem, so managed k8s is not an option. Experts tells me I should have 2 FTE to run k8s, which I don't have. k8s has so many components, how should I debug that in case of issues without k8s experience? k8s APIs change continuously, how should I manage that without k8s experience?

It's not a k8s replacement. But I do see a sweet spot for such a solution. We still run Docker Swarm on 5 servers, no hyperscalers, no API changes expected ;-)

Those are all sub-par cloud technologies which perform very badly and do not scale at all.

Some people would rather build their own solutions to do these things with fine-grain control and the ability to handle workloads more complex that a shopping cart website.