Comment by literalAardvark

k8s doesn't really weigh you down, especially if tuned for the low end use case (k1s). It encourages some dumb decisions that do, such as using Prometheus stack with default settings, but by itself it just eats a lot of ram.

Now using CPU limits in k8s with cgroups v1 does hurt performance. But doing that would hurt performance without k8s too.