I was able to setup an entire ecosystem from scratch in a week that scales well and can be managed in one location.
When I first looked at Kubernetes, the complicated part was setting it up on a cluster. If you use Kubernetes on GCE, or Azure, you don't have to do that step, everything else is ready to go for you!
- Automatic scaling of your application
- Service discovery
- Secrets and config management
- Logging in one central dashboard
- Able to deploy various complicated, distributed, pieces of software very easily using Helm (Jenkins, Kafka, Grafana + Prometheus)
- Able to add new nodes to the cluster easily
- Health checks and automatic restarts
- Able to deploy any container to your cluster in a really simple way (if you look at Deployments, it's really simple.)
- Switch between cloud providers and still maintain the same workflow.
I won't ever touch Ansible again, I really prefer the Kubernetes way of handling operations (it's like a live organism instead of something you apply changes to.)
Also, the entire argument that you probably don't need Kubernetes because your organization doesn't have 10s, or 100s of nodes just doesn't make sense after using it.
Having a Kubernetes cluster with 3 nodes is 100% worth it, even for rather simple applications in my opinion. The benefits are just way too good.