Although most of the articles focus on the benefits of Kubernetes for work, where you usually have more options (e.g. AWS Fargate), I've found it extremely helpful in the case where you want to self-host stuff personally/"at home", but you also want above average resilience so you use multiple nodes (e.g. 3 raspberry pi).

You can probably DIY something or always run all the things on all 3 nodes to achieve the same effect, but the first time I saw a node going down and Kubernetes automatically deployed the affected pods to a healthy node, it felt like having AWS on-prem.

Also, doing things in a standard way each time means it's really easy to bootstrap new things, not always reinventing the wheel. Especially cron jobs, I always lost track of those before. Now it's really easy to get an overview. Secrets as well, having it built-in just saves so much "how should I do this again".

Plus base OS upgrades are now really uneventful, since besides k3s (single-binary Kubernetes distribution), there's nothing else installed on the host.

The complexity is of course higher, you need a load balancer to point to all your cluster IPs since we don't get one "for free" from the cloud, shared storage is still something I'm looking into what's the best way to do (NAS with NFS, minio, ...), you most likely need a private registry, and probably others I'm missing.

Nonetheless, since migrating from manually run docker images, I find it a lot more comfortable and even with less downtime (taking down a single node is a non-event now versus "everything is down").