Comment by yjftsjthsd-h

> Then again, demands are rising, and I'm starting to feel boxed-in by the hardware nodes the cluster runs on—I still need to account for the number of CPU cores to estimate the proper number of replicas for a worker container, for example.

Have you switched to Hetzner bare metal? I'm pretty sure that'll raise your performance ceiling significantly.

> But every time I reach this point, I start to dive into the documentation, the Big Cloud pricing charts, the upgrade procedures… I feel like I can avoid steering into the complexity maelstrom just a little longer.

You can run k8s on Hetzner. Downside: Running k8s yourself. Upside: Not dealing with big cloud providers.