I'm getting tired of the "You don't actually need Kubernetes while starting out!" crowd, despite being part of it. Of course you don't. Of course if you don't know Kubernetes, learning it as you try to get a company going on a minimum headcount is not the most efficient approach.

But for pete's sakes man, if you have used K8s before, know what you're doing and you're running on cloud, just shove a couple off-the-shelf Terraform modules at the problem and there's your execution environment needs solved, with easy and reliable automations available for handling certs, external access, load balancing, etc, all of it reasonably easy to get going once you have done it before.

Stop pretending Kubernetes is this humongous infrastructure investment that mandates a full time job to keep up at low scale. Of course if you have done this multiple times before you don't need to be told this, but people new to it shouldn't be fed a barrage of exaggerations.