[Dedime]

I'll add my opinion as a DevOps engineer, not a startup, so take it with a grain of salt.

* Kubernetes is great for a lot of things, and I think there's many use cases for it where it's the best option bar none

* Particularly once you start piling on requirements - we need logging, we need metrics, we need rolling redeployments, we need HTTPS, we need a reverse proxy, we need a load balancer, we need healthchecks. Many (not all!) of these things are what mature services want, and k8s provides a standardized way to handle them.

* K8s IS complex. I won't lie. You need someone who understands it. But I do enjoy it, and I think others do too.

* The next best alternative in my opinion (if you don't want vendor lock in) is docker-compose. It's easy to deploy locally or on a server

* If you use docker-compose, but you find yourself wanting more, migrating to k8s should be straightforward

So to answer your questions, I think you can adopt k8s whenever you feel like it, assuming you have the expertise and are willing to dedicate time to maintaining it. I use it in my home network with a 1 node "cluster". The biggest pitfalls are all related to vendor lock in - managed Redis, Azure Key Vault. Hyper specific config related to your managed k8s provider that might be tough to untangle. At the same time, you can just as easily start small with docker-compose and scale up later as needed.