Reminds me of myself, and probably many others on here. I've always been a skeptic of novelty. Just like with cryptocoins I was there on the ground floor, I remember when Docker was launching. I remember trying to understand what it was, and I remember someone comparing it to MSI for Linux.

Unlike cryptocoins I didn't miss out on being a millionaire with containers. :(

I just avoided containers until 2019! So to me it was first containers, and then kubernetes.

That way I was already sold on the whole container image concept and namespaces in your OS, I had used FreeBSD jails in the early 2000s.

So when I understood k8s I realized it's literally just a container orchestrator. It might seem complicated but that's all to do with being able to run containers on a range of nodes instead of just one. And of course having an API to tie it all together.

Whether you project needs that or not is something you should definitely explore in depth before you set out and try to use it. Personally I prefer container hosts over k8s for most startup projects. I look forward to Talos' new podman package and being able to deploy a minimal podman container host with Talos, no k8s necessary.