I disagree - I think k8s is absolutely the right choice at that level. We use ECS instead of k8s for small projects because the control plane is more than the actual service, but when you want container management, some sort of basic deployment management, service discovery, storage management and secret management, k8s is super simple to run and works pretty much out of the box. For a homelab, I'd expect you to want this. Building it all yourself may be fun (and that's a good reason to do it), but it's going to result in all the complexity with a lot of issues that k8s just solves for you.