This sort of "just" thinking is a great way for teams to drown in ops toil.
This sort of "just" thinking is a great way for teams to drown in ops toil.
In my experience, most k8s deployments are just "dumb" docker images, they're not very "k8s native".
Your use case may be more complex, which is why you have had more difficulty keeping things up-to-date.
https://helm.sh/docs/topics/version_skew/
Istio: https://istio.io/latest/docs/releases/supported-releases/#su...
Literally every kubernetes manifest that hits the server uses a k8s api:
apiVersion: apps/v1(genuine tone, not rhetorical)
But, to reiterate, everything uses APIs. The *betavX APIs are of course likely to be deprecated and replaced with stable APIs after a few versions.
So if you are going to compare with a managed solution, compare with something equivalent. Take a bare managed cluster and add a single Deployment to it, it will be no more complex than ECS, while giving you much better developer ergonomics.