Let’s be honest: Kubernetes is the undisputed king of orchestration. But if you are running a small to medium-sized environment, deploying K8s is often like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It brings massive resource overhead and operational complexity that most projects simply do not need.

Worse yet, despite its size, Kubernetes isn't actually a complete solution out of the box.

If you want proper SRE management—like native observability, health checks, and Service Level Objectives (SLOs)—you have to bolt on a complex stack of external tools. Need Ingress management to expose your services? You'll have to configure and maintain third-party Ingress controllers just to get traffic flowing.

That architectural bloat led me to advocate for a more minimalist approach.…