Kubernetes: When Not To
K8s solves real problems. Most early-stage teams do not have those problems.
Kubernetes is excellent at the problems Kubernetes was designed to solve: heterogeneous workload scheduling at scale, multi-team platform standardization, complex stateful systems with strong operator support. It is overwhelming for the problems most early-stage teams actually have, which are 'deploy this container reliably' and 'roll it back if it breaks.'
Managed application platforms have caught up substantially. For a team of fewer than 20 engineers, a PaaS or a fly/render/railway-style deployment surface is almost always faster, cheaper, and more reliable than rolling K8s. The migration to K8s, when it becomes necessary, is real engineering work — but defer it until it is necessary.