In fact, it was so low maintenance that I lost my SSH key for the master node and I had to reprovision the entire cluster. Took about 90 mins including the time spent updating my docs. If it was critical I could have got that down to 15 mins tops.
20€/mo for a k8s cluster using k3s, exclusively on ARM, 3 nodes 1 master, some storage, and a load balancer with automatic dns on cloudflare.
Anecdotes like these are not helpful.
I have thousands of services I'm running on ~10^5 hosts and all kinds of compliance and contractual requirements to how I maintain my systems. Maintenance pain is a very real table-stakes conversation for people like us.
Your comment is like pure noise in our space.
You're right: they're using managed Kubernetes instead - which covers 90% of the maintenance complexity.
But nowhere near the reductive bullshit comment of "there's no maintenance because my $20/mo stack says so".
Installing is super fast.
We don't do backup of the cluster for example for that reason ( except databases etc) we just reprovision the whole cluster.
I believe there's no need to go that path for most applications. A simple kustomize script already handles most of the non-esoteric needs.
Sometimes things are simple of that's how we want them to be.