This seems like a pretty big stack for a single person to administrate - how much time do you spend on doing operations vs development?
I know it seems like a lot of tools, but most of them are set up once and forget. Except for the occasional round of dependency updates. But even for that I have automated dependency/container scanning to detect vulnerabilities, and get notified if updating an image is recommended.
Most of the stack consists of "platform" tools, such as the ingress-nginx, external-dns, or cert-manager. So it's stuff I take with me for every project. It's like a personal Heroku I've been building, but way cheaper and fully customizable.
I've been iterating on this stack over the years with various other projects, and also learned a lot from running Kubernetes in production at my full-time job, so it's not something I'd advise for someone who just wants to deploy their MVP for the first time.
The ops environment still looks overwhelming to me, if there's a way to do it sustainably without a really heavy-weight ops infrastructure, I haven't figured it out. Like, something that to me requires like a full-time job just to do ops, although maybe not if you've spent some years learning the ops tools, but then same same.
You can get really far with the managed services from your cloud provider.
If you're already familiar with Docker containers, just that already gives you plenty of options. I think every platform now provides a way to just run containers behind a load balancer with a few simple steps.
Yes, maybe it's a form of vendor lock-in, but if your worry is acquiring customers, and growing a company, Kubernetes is probably not helping you in this case.
Kubernetes/Terraform and friends are really useful as a solo-dev if, and only if you have the required experience with them.
"I know it seems like a lot of tools, but most of them are set up once and forget. Except for the occasional round of dependency updates. But even for that I have automated dependency/container scanning to detect vulnerabilities, and get notified if updating an image is recommended."
The docs make it look really complicated, but it comes down to enabling the service on the Terraform config.
Also for app dependencies, I use bots to open PRs on my repo whenever an important security fix is published for one of my dependencies.