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But that k8s engineer's cost is spread over all the functions the cluster is doing, not just the rpc setup.

Yeah, the situation from TFA doesn't make a lot of sense; I was just highlighting that it's not as clear-cut as "costs > 1 FTE => fix it."

Yep. Opportunity cost is the importantly thing. Though a well-managed org will scale capacity against some ROI threshold.

If you’re skipping 8 $300k projects a year that could be done by one fully-burdened $400k developer, something is wrong.

Kube is trivial to run. You hit a few switches on GKE/EKS and then a few simple configs. It doesn't take very many engineer hours to run. Infrastructure these days is trivial to operate. As an example, I run a datacenter cluster myself for a micro-SaaS in the process of SOC2 Type 2 compliance. The infra itself is pretty reliable. I had to run some power-kill sims before I traveled and it came back A+. With GKE/EKS this is even easier.

Over the years of running these I think the key is to keep the cluster config manual and then you just deploy your YAMLs from a repo with hydration of secrets or whatever.