Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration at scale. It has also become a source of significant operational complexity for teams that do not need its full capabilities. Running Kubernetes for a small or mid-sized application can mean spending more engineering time managing infrastructure than building product.
When You Actually Need Kubernetes
- You are running 20+ microservices with different scaling profiles.
- You need fine-grained resource allocation and bin packing across a large cluster.
- You have a team with dedicated platform engineering capacity to manage it.
- You are deploying multi-region, multi-cloud, or on-premises infrastructure.
- You need advanced deployment strategies (canary, blue-green at service level) across many services.
Lighter Alternatives That Work Well
- AWS ECS + Fargate: Managed container execution. No cluster to manage. Good for most containerised web services.
- AWS App Runner: Even more managed — push a container image, get an HTTPS endpoint. Suitable for simple services.
- Google Cloud Run: Serverless containers with automatic scaling to zero. Excellent cost model for variable traffic.
- Railway / Render / Fly.io: Platform-as-a-service for containerised apps with minimal operational overhead.
Managed Kubernetes When You Do Need K8s
If you need Kubernetes, use a managed offering — EKS, GKE, or AKS — rather than self-hosted. The control plane management is handled by the cloud provider, and the operational burden drops significantly. Pair it with a GitOps tool like ArgoCD or Flux to manage deployments declaratively.
Figuring out the right infrastructure for your product?
Asquarify designs infrastructure that matches your current scale and your growth trajectory. We will not over-engineer your infrastructure.
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