Agree, I would never want to go back to the old bad days of managing a real rack at a datacenter, with exactly the same guarantees of a single region deployment inside any cloud. BUT it is true that all the multi region/AZ guarantees + logs + dashboards + network services @ AWS costs tend to skyrocket in a couple of years. And here is where k8s really shines, in my opinion: allowing you to abstract your deployment away from a cloud even on cheap hosting. All the rest outlined in the article is just reinventing the wheel.