> And it's managed.

Can’t use cloud stuff on-prem and also if your clients have a server room of their own. Same for homelab.

Also it’s nice not to shift the pets attitude from servers to clusters and instead treat everything as cattle - provided you have backups of persistent data and the config versioned in a Git repo and there’s maybe some Ansible in the mix, being able to recreate an environment in the case of a fuckup is nice and also helps against bit rot.

Disclaimer: I actually prefer Docker Swarm/Compose over K8s due to simplicity (which matches my deployments and scale), but in the cases where I had to use a variety of K8s, going for K3s was pretty okay.

If you peel off all the layers in Docker Swarm and K8s, technically it has the same level of complexity. In k8s there are a lot of concepts. I would argue you have the same network, storage, and compute complexities as an operator.