Yes. This is a big part of what initially drew me to Elixir. It's more than feasible to run a server on a cheap VPS, get great, though not quite Golang or low-level language performance and have a much easier scaling story when you need multiple machines.

More importantly, you generally don't need an external queue service, in-memory KV store, task scheduler or many of the other things that JS/Ruby/Python stacks need. By consolidating just about everything but the DB in a single, well designed system, it's possible for a very small team to take on relatively large challenges on a smaller budget.

Where does your Erlang code runs in the first place? ( maybe kubernetes already )

Kubernetes does all of that in a standard and easy way but also is completely language agnostic. So your Python code without modidication can benefit from it.

is that a fair comparison? i dont love k8s but you can deploy anything to it, not just erlang or elixir