As a solo dev who just started his second cluster a few days ago... I like it.

Upfront costs a little higher than I'd like. I'm paying $24 for a droplet + $12 for a load balancer, plus maybe $1 for a volume.

I could probably run my current workload on a $12 droplet but apparently Cilium is a memory hog and that makes the smaller droplet infeasible, and it seems not practical to not run a load balancer.

But now I can run several distinct apps running different frameworks and versions of php, node, bun, nginx, whatever and spin them up and tear them down in minutes and I kind of love that. And if I ever get any significant amount of users I can press a button and scale up or horizontally.

I don't have to muck about with pm2 or supervisord or cronjobs, that's built in. I don't have to muck about with SSL certs/certbot, that's built in.

I have SSO across all my subdomains. That was a little annoying to get running, took a day and a half to figure out but it was a one time thing and the config is all committed in YAML so if I ever forget how it works I have something to reference instead of trying to remember 100 shell commands I randomly ran on a naked VPS.

Upgrades are easy. Can upgrade the distro or whatever package easily.

Downsides are deploys take a minute or two instead of sub-second.

It took weeks of tinkering to get a good DX going, but I've happily settled on DevSpace. Again it takes a couple minutes to start up and probably oodles of RAM instead of milliseconds but I can maintain 10 different projects without trying to keep my dev machine in sync with everything.

So some trade-offs but I've decided it's a net win after you're over the initial learning hump.

As the sibling comment already mentioned, k8s is not much more complexity once you're past the learning curve. I used to host with ec2 + scripts earlier. K8s actually solves a lot of problems that you will have to solve yourself anyway.

Running Kubernetes in a managed environment like DO is no harder than using docker compose.