> When you get to this scale, tools like Kubernetes make more sense
They are no where near the scale where Kubernetes makes sense as anything but a tools for making deployments easier. Ignoring the deployment part, I think many are pretty clueless about how big you truly need to benefit from Kubernetes and how much ekstra overhead you'll have in terms of managing clusters.
To be fair, if you application was designed with Kubernetes in mind, the scale where you can make use of it starts a lot smaller. When paying ~6k$ in servers, you're way past the point where adding it would noticeably impact your bill.
As I outlined in my other response, it does not make sense to make the switch in this case (IMO). But if I were to design an application at this scale and the team would have sufficient knowledge in Kubernetes, I'd definitely consider deploying to a cluster - the overhead could be quickly countered by development speed and fail safety, especially when choosing something simpler like k3s.
But I agree that it's definitely not needed here, that scale is a few orders of magnitude away.
They are no where near the scale where Kubernetes makes sense as anything but a tools for making deployments easier. Ignoring the deployment part, I think many are pretty clueless about how big you truly need to benefit from Kubernetes and how much ekstra overhead you'll have in terms of managing clusters.