I would argue that small to medium web services don’t need Kubernetes nor serverless. It doesn’t even need to be split into services. Build a tidy monolith and see how far that takes you first. Have less moving parts.

Yes, serveless ties you in to platform specifics but in their nature the functions you create should be small and easy to reimplement elsewhere.

Kubernetes on the other hand is arguably also a certain lock-in, by virtue of being complicated. No wonder vendors love it, it’s an offering that is hard to do right in-house. And when Kubernetes releases updates only the most seasoned in-house teams will be able to keep up. It creates job security by being a lot to learn and manage. Yes there are good abstractions but when something breaks you’ll need to delve into that complexity below. (Makes me think of ORM abstractions vs SQL.)

Yes, Kubernetes is an awesome vehicle for orchestrating a swarm of containerized services. But when you’re not Netflix or Twitter scale it’s ridiculous to worship this complexity.

Frankly I keep coming back to appreciate Heroku's abstractions and its twelve factor app philosophy https://12factor.net/. Heroku runs on AWS but feels like a different world than AWS to develop on. I can actually get projects flying with a 2-3 person team me included.