Been running 3 services on a single 4GB droplet for 18 months. Started with K8s because "that's what production does", spent two weeks on docker-compose networking, gave up, just use systemd now.

The thing nobody tells you: K8s shines at maybe 50+ services or 100+ engineers. Below that it's overhead pretending to be infrastructure. You're not dealing with rolling updates across clusters. You're dealing with one app and two sidecars.

For small teams, docker-compose or just plain docker with systemd is genuinely better. Faster deploys (no control plane lag), easier to debug (you can actually ssh and poke around), and your deployment fits in your head.

We use managed k8s at work for good reasons - multi-region failover, true horizontal scaling. But that's not most startups. Most startups have a Go API, a React SPA, maybe postgres. systemd handles that in 100 lines of config.

The sunk cost of learning K8s is real and people don't want to admit they wasted it.