Every few months, I open the same question again: should this thing be running on Kubernetes?

I build security tooling as a solo founder. My stack is unglamorous on purpose: a FastAPI service with a deterministic Python scoring engine, a React frontend, PostgreSQL, and everything deployed on Cloud Run. It works. It scales when it needs to and scales to nothing when it does not. And yet the question keeps returning, because Kubernetes is the default answer in so many rooms, and "just use Cloud Run" can start to feel like a decision I made by accident rather than on purpose.

So I finally wrote the decision down — the framework I use, the five questions I ask, and when I would switch. If you are a solo builder choosing between GKE Autopilot and Cloud Run, this is the post I wish I had found earlier. Not because my answer is yours, but because the questions are portable.

What I actually run, and why it matters

Context first, because "which is better" is meaningless without it.…