Kubernetes Is Overkill for 90% of Companies: When You Actually Need It

Introduction

Let’s face an uncomfortable truth right away: Kubernetes is a luxury that startups with 5 or 50 employees simply cannot afford. If your application is used by a few thousand users, Kubernetes is a luxury in that case as well. And if you have a monolithic application running on a couple of servers, then Kubernetes is certainly a luxury.

And yet, every single day, engineering teams talk themselves into the idea that they need Kubernetes. They spend months on it, hire highly paid DevOps engineers to keep it running, and rack up cloud bills that put a CFO into a crying fitall to launch an app that probably would have worked without a hitch on a single $20/month VPS.

The outcome? Companies throw away hundreds of thousands of dollars plus a plethora of engineering hours in order to manage the unnecessary complexity of their infrastructure, rather than satisfying their customers by building the features they actually want.

This essay is oriented towards assisting you in your decision-making process regarding a crucial question that you should be asking yourself whether you really need Kubernetes or if you are simply going along with the hype.

What Kubernetes Actually Does?

Before we debate whether Kubernetes is overkill for a situation, we need to understand what it is that it really does.

Kubernetes is, essentially, a container orchestration platform that manages the deployment, scaling, and operations of containerized applications across clusters of machines.

Main features:

  • Automatic scaling: Add or remove container instances based on loadSelf.
  • Healing: Automatically restart the failed containers.
  • Load Balancing: Distribute traffic amongst multiple containers.
  • Rolling updates: New versions are deployed without downtime.
  • Service discovery: Containers can find and communicate with each other.
  • Resource management: Optimizing the usage of CPU and memory across workloads.

It sounds quite great, doesn’t it? And it actually is if those are the things you want. The problem is that most companies do not want that.

The 90% Who Don't Need Kubernetes

Let’s be brutally honest about who doesn’t need Kubernetes:

a. Startups and Small Companies

If your company size is less than 50 employees and you have less than 10, 000 active users, you most likely don’t have to use Kubernetes.

Why not:

  1. Your traffic does not need auto-scaling.
  2. A single server or a small server cluster is sufficient to handle your load.
  3. Deployment complexity is more of a problem than a solution to your velocity.
  4. Your engineering time is more effective for building features.
  5. You cannot afford a dedicated.
  6. The 
    DevOps team to maintain it.

What to use instead:

  • Platform as a Service: Heroku, Render, Railway, Fly.io.
  • Simple VPS: DigitalOcean Droplet, Linode, Vultr.
  • Serverless: Vercel, Netlify, AWS Lambda.

b. Monolithic Applications

You’ve got just one application with a single database; Kubernetes is definitely overkill.
Why not:

  • There are no microservices that need orchestration.
  • No intricate service, to service communication.
  • The easy deployment process doesn’t require orchestration.
  • A database cannot be effectively containerized anyway.

What to use instead:

  1. Conventional VPS with systemd or PM2.
  2. Docker Compose on a single server.
  3. Managed platforms such as Heroku or Railway.

c. Low-Traffic Applications

If your application receives fewer than 1, 000 requests per minute, you don’t require Kubernetes-level scaling.
Reasons:

  • A single server can easily handle the load.
    Scaling is not something you need to worry about.
  • The complexity of scaling muddies the performance and is more expensive than a bigger server.
  • Your bottleneck is probably the database, not the application.

What to use instead:

  1. Vertical scaling (bigger server).
  2. Simple horizontal scaling with a load balancer.
  3. Managed services that scale automatically for you.

Companies Without DevOps Expertise

If your engineers don’t have the right hands-on experience with Kubernetes, the time they’ll take to learn will be so long that your work productivity will be frozen.
Why not:

  1. Kubernetes has a particularly difficult learning curve.
  2. You’ll be busy learning for months instead of delivering.
  3. When issues arise (and they will), you’ll be helpless in solving them.
  4. Documentation is written on the assumption that you are already familiar with distributed systems.

What to use instead:

  • Managed platforms that hide the complexity.
  • Simple architectures that you can fully grasp.
  • Only bring in experts if/when you really need to work with Kubernetes.

When You Actually Need Kubernetes:

Let’s dive into the 10% of companies where Kubernetes is a good fit:

1. High-Scale Applications

If your system is processing over 10, 000 incoming requests per minute and the traffic pattern is unpredictable, deploying Kubernetes will be a wise decision.

Reasons why you need it:

  1. Auto-scaling the application based on CPU, memory, or custom metrics.
  2. Handling traffic spikes without any manual intervention.
  3. Making optimal use of resources across multiple servers.
  4. Automatic failover if your instances crash.

Real example: An online shopping platform with very fluctuating traffic due to seasonality (Black Friday, holidays). The use of Kubernetes automatically scales the number of containers from 10 to 100 at the height of the traffic and then back to 10 to save on costs.

2. Complex Microservices Architectures

If your 10+ independent services have to communicate, scale, and deploy separately, Kubernetes gives you orchestration that you can’t easily replicate.

Why you need it:

  • Service discovery and communication.
  • Independent scaling for each service.
  • Coordinated deployments across services.
  • Network isolation and security policies.

Real example: Large SaaS platform having separate services for authentication, billing, analytics, notifications, etc. Each service scales separately according to its specific load patterns.

3. Multi-Region Deployments

If you want to run your application in different parts of the world with traffic routing and failover, Kubernetes gives you the right infrastructure.

Why you need it:

  1. Deploy to several cloud providers or regions.
  2. Automatic traffic routing to the closest region.
  3. Failover in case whole regions are down.
  4. The same deployment process everywhere.

Real example: A global application that is used by people in the US, Europe, and Asia. Separate Kubernetes clusters in each region, with smart traffic routing.

Enterprise Compliance Requirements

Resource isolation, audit logging, and security policies are examples of enterprise compliance requirements that Kubernetes satisfies by default.

Why you should have it:

  • Network policies to isolate services.
  • RBAC (Role, Based Access Control) to manage access.
  • Audit logging for compliance.
  • Secrets management.
  • Container scanning and security policies.

You Have Dedicated DevOps Resources

Kubernetes makes sense if you have engineers whose main job is managing infrastructure.
Reasons to use it:

  1. There is always someone to keep the cluster in good shape.
  2. Monitoring and alerting are set up properly.
  3. If something goes wrong, someone knows how to fix it.
  4. You can do cost optimization over time.

The real cost of Kubernetes

Let’s cover the dollar side. Studies have shown that the majority of enterprises significantly undervalue the overall Kubernetes cost:

Infrastructure Expenses:

Minimum viable Kubernetes cluster:

  • Master nodes: 3 x $50/month = $150/month
  • Worker nodes: 3 x $100/month = $300/month
  • Load balancer: $50/month
  • Monitoring: $100/month
  • Total: $600, 1, 000/month minimum

Compare to other options:

  1. Heroku: $25-100/month for small applications.
  2. Single VPS: $20-50/month.
  3. Docker Compose on DigitalOcean: $40-80/month.

Engineering Time

Initial setup: 2-4 weeks of engineering time.
Ongoing maintenance: 10-20 hours per month.
Learning curve: 1-3 months before the team is productive.

Cost calculation:

  • Senior DevOps Engineer: $150K/year salary = ~$75/hour.
  • 4 weeks initial setup: 160 hours x $75 = $12,000.
  • Monthly maintenance: 20 hours x $75 = $1,500/month.
  • First year total: $30,000+ in engineering time.

Hidden Costs

  1. Monitoring tools (Datadog, New Relic): $200-500/month.
  2. CI/CD pipeline complexity: Additional setup and maintenance.
  3. Debugging time: 2-3x longer to troubleshoot issues.
  4. Training costs: Courses, certifications, conferences.

Kubernetes Overkill in Action

Below are real-life scenarios where Kubernetes has been overkill:

1. Startup Case Study

Company: SaaS startup with 3 engineers and 500 paying customers

Their mistake:

  • Implemented Kubernetes “to be ready for scale”.
  • Spent 6 weeks setting up the cluster.
  • Application traffic: ~50 requests per minute.
  • Could have run on a $40/month server

Cost:

  1. Infrastructure: $800/month.
  2. Engineering time: 6 weeks initial + 15 hours/month ongoing.
  3. Opportunity cost: Feature launches postponed by 2 months.

What they should have done:

  • Deploy to Heroku or Railway for $50/month.
  • Focus on building the features that customers want.
  • Think about Kubernetes only when they got 10, 000+ users.

2. Mid-Size Company Case Study

Company: B2B SaaS with 30 employees and a monolithic Rails application

Their mistake:

  1. CTO read that “Kubernetes is the future”.
  2. Migrated from Heroku to self, managed Kubernetes.
  3. Without microservices, only one monolithic app.
  4. The traffic was predictable and stable.

Result:

  • Increase in infrastructure costs from $200 to $ 1,200/month.
  • The complexity of deployment increased tenfold.
  • Simple deploys ran from 5 minutes to 30 minutes.
  • More downtime due to configuration errors.

What they should have done:

  1. Stayed on Heroku.
  2. Put the main emphasis on the application optimization.
  3. Only thought about Kubernetes when they broke the monolith into microservices.

Alternatives to Kubernetes

Need something other than Kubernetes? What else works if it’s too much?

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

Best for: Startups, small teams, rapid prototyping.

Options:

  1. Heroku: Classic PaaS, easy deployments, addon ecosystem.
  2. Render: Modern Heroku alternative, better pricing.
  3. Railway: Developer-friendly, excellent DX.
  4. Fly.io: Global deployment, edge computing focus.

Pros:

  • Deploy in minutes, not weeks.
  • Managed databases, caching, and logging.
  • Automatic SSL, backups, and monitoring.
  • Focus on code, not infrastructure.

Cons:

  1. More expensive at scale.
  2. Less control over infrastructure.
  3. Vendor lock-in.

Docker Compose

Best for: Small teams, moderate traffic, full control

Setup:

Pros:

  1. Simple, understandable configuration.
  2. Runs on a single server or small cluster.
  3. Full Docker benefits without Kubernetes complexity.
  4. Easy to debug and maintain.

Cons:

  • No automatic scaling.
  • Manual failover.
  • Limited to single-host or small clusters.

Serverless

Best for: Event-driven applications, variable traffic, microservices.

Allowable choices:

  • Vercel/Netlify: Frontend + serverless functions, AWS.
  • Lambda: Full serverless backend, Google Cloud.
  • Functions: Event-driven workloads.
  • Cloudflare Workers: Edge computing.

Pros:

  • Only pay for what you use.
  • Unlimited scaling.
  • No infrastructure management.
  • Fast cold starts (modern runtimes).

Cons:

  1. Not suitable for all workloads.
  2. Cold start latency for some providers.
  3. Vendor-specific code.
  4. Debugging can be challenging.

Simple Deployment Example

Here’s how simple deployment should be for most companies:

Seriously, ditch the YAML, forget kubectl, and skip cluster management. Most companies (like 90%) don’t even need it. Just throw in a load balancer if you want backups, grab a managed database, and boom—you’re all set.

When to Graduate to Kubernetes

So, what is the right time to dive into Kubernetes? Here are the indicators that are quite obvious:

Indicator 1: Consistent High Traffic

You are constantly providing 10, 000+ requests per minute, with traffic spikes that are unpredictable.

Indicator 2: Multiple Independent Services

Your 10+ microservices need to be scaled and deployed independently.

Indicator 3: Multi-Region Deployment

You want to launch your app in different regions of the world and have a failover system without human intervention.

Indicator 4: Complicated Scaling Requirements

Various application components require different scaling by adopting different metrics.

Indicator 5: You Have Enough Money

You have a budget for both infrastructure costs and DevOps personnel.

If you don’t find 3 out of these 5 signals, then probably Kubernetes is too complicated for your situation.

Making the Right Choice

Here’s a decision framework for infrastructure choices:

Start Simple:

  1. Use PaaS (Heroku, Render, Railway) until it’s obviously not enough.
  2. Move to Docker Compose on VPS when you want more control.
  3. Think about managed Kubernetes (EKS, GKE) when complexity justifies it.
  4. Keep a self-managed Kubernetes only if you have a dedicated DevOps team.

Red Flags That You're Over-Engineering:

  • Spending more time on infrastructure than features.
  • Can’t deploy without referencing documentation.
  • Deployment takes longer than 15 minutes.
  • Engineers need to learn new tools instead of building a product.
  • Infrastructure costs exceed $1,000/month for a low-traffic app.

Green Lights for Kubernetes:

  1. The current infrastructure can’t handle traffic.
  2. Deployment and scaling are manual and painful.
  3. You have DevOps engineers who know Kubernetes.
  4. The infrastructure budget supports the investment.
  5. Alternative solutions have been exhausted.

Conclusion

Kubernetes represents more complexity than what 90% of the companies really need. It’s not just a statement for impactit’s a very much needed nudge the tech industry has to take.

The main source of pressure to use Kubernetes is:

  1. Tech blogs and influencers are pushing “best practices”.
  2. Resume, driven development (engineers want to have Kubernetes on their resumes).
  3. Fear of missing out on the “right” architecture.
  4. Overestimating how big the scale will get in the future.

However, here is the real situation:

Your best infrastructure in the first place is the one that is at the same time simple and adequate to your needs. Complex things cost, not just in money and time, but also in missed opportunities.

If you’re an early-stage company or a small one, start by using a PaaS. You can deploy within minutes, focus on building features and growing your business.

When you do reach the limits imposed by the simple infrastructure, you will have both the money and the team to go for Kubernetes.

Don’t let Kubernetes overkill be the one that holds you back.

Start simple. Scale only when you really need to. Achieve success.

Getting Started with Orbilon Technologies

At Orbilon Technologies, our main focus is to help companies make wise infrastructure choices. We start by understanding your true requirements, then we figure out the appropriate level of complexity, and finally, we put in place solutions that will help your business to grow rather than hinder it.

Our Services:

  • Infrastructure assessment and right-sizing.
  • PaaS to Kubernetes migration (when you actually need it).
  • Docker Compose and simple deployment solutions.
  • Managed Kubernetes setup and optimization.
  • DevOps training and best practices.

Through our service, we’ve helped companies save hundreds of thousands of dollars by simply avoiding unnecessary complexity and choosing infrastructure that best fits their scale and needs.

Feeling like making smart infrastructure decisions?

You can always find more information about us at orbilontech.com or just send an email to support@orbilontech.com for a chat about your infrastructure needs.

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Are you ready to turn your ideas into a reality? Hire Orbilon Technologies today and start working right away with qualified resources. We will take care of everything from design, development, security, quality assurance and deployment. We are just a click away.

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