The right tool for the right job.

I agree that many small businesses jump to Kube too early. If your entire app is a monolith and maybe a few supplementary services, then Kube is massive overkill.

But many people also tend to overlook all of the other benefits that suddenly become very easy to add when you already have Kube, such as a common way to collect logs and metrics, injecting instrumentation, autoscaling, automated certificate handling, automated DNS management, encrypting internal network traffic, deployment tools that practically works out of the box, and of course immutable declarative deployments.

Of course you can build all of this yourself, when you need it, but once you have the foundation up and running, it becomes quite easy to just add a helm chart and suddenly have a new capability.

In my opinion, when the company it big enough to need a dedicated ops team, then it's big enough to benefit from Kube.